Yeah, I get it now, too. No, I wouldn’t push someone away, but I’m not able to be a robot, either.
So what if he asks you to refill the Brita pitcher during dinner, while the game is on in the background at an obscene volume?
Then he dies. And no female juror on earth would vote to convict her.
Yes. Despite the overwhelming evidence that he only looked at the water pitcher, and the TV was on in another room but muted.
My head hurts, my body aches clear down to my knees, I want to stuff my face, and sometimes i just don’t want to do A GODDAMN THING. It feels like I’ve been hit with 2 by 4s. Clothes are a bummer because I have nothing to wear and I might feel like cutting my hair off so i don’t have to deal with it. The blankets are too hot, or itchy, or just wrong.
I’ve been trying to go through my closet and cannot decide what to keep and what to pitch… I might have to put it off until next week.
I’m going to ask if you got your driver’s licence from a Crackerjack box. I might not be able to decide what i want for dinner. In my car, where no one can hear me yell, the music will be loud and I will use many unprintable insults.
I probably still have 15 years of this garbage left. And it bugs me. It’s the big reason why I would like to have to not share a bedroom with a husband because I NEED a SPACE if I just can’t cope. Yet if I have a chance, I’d like to have sex because it could distract me from my aches and pains.
Angry crying sex?
Well, silver linings and all that.
Quoted for truth. I have always had some irritable behaviour, but the last couple of years (I’m almost 45) it’s been like, “HOLY SHIT! THESE NEGATIVE EMOTIONS GO TO ELEVEN!” I finally went to see my doctor, and he told me that I probably have PMDD, where for some unknown reason your body reduces the level of serotonin it produces for the second half of your cycle (that’s the current theory), and clinical treatment with selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors has proven effective.
As for controlling your emotions, I totally agree that PMS or PMDD is no excuse to turn everyone in your life into an emotional punching bag, but it’s not that simple. My thought process often goes like this; “He’s doing X again. Why do I always tolerate that? He shouldn’t do X. I should tell him not to do X,” when all the rest of the time, X doesn’t really bother me. It makes perfect logical sense at the time. It takes A LOT of self-awareness and self-discipline to differentiate between your logical brain talking and your hormones talking. Maybe a comparison could be made to the sex drive in men; you often know intellectually something is a bad idea, but it just seems like SUCH a good idea at the time! 
If, outside of PMS you would react to these situations in a more measured way, what would be the reason for the measured response vs the “Fuck off” response? I assume it’s because, when you don’t have PMS, you think that the snappy response is rude. If this is the case, then I would dispute the part in bold above, if you choose the rude response when you do have PMS.
That is, if putting up with people’s bullshit without ripping their heads off is part of the grease that allows society function and is considered the polite way to go about things, and if ripping people’s heads off for minor to medium annoyances is considered bitchy/jerkish, then you can’t choose the latter during PMS and the former during non-PMS and think that you are being ‘not a bitch’ during PMS.
Of course, people shouldn’t be doormats, and there should be a threshold to how much bullshit we put up with and still remain polite. But that threshold, and the severity of our response, should not vary with the day of the month.
If you think that you let too much slide when you don’t have PMS, and PMS brings you clarity and helps you not be so much of a doormat, then perhaps you should reconsider how much you put up with during non-PMS days. If you think that your response during non-PMS days is not doormat-ish and is the proper response, then angry and rude responses to minor bullshit during PMS is being bitchy/jerkish.
On the bright side, being asked to refill the Brita pitcher would eliminate the unpleasant surprise of opening the fridge and finding it in there with only 1cm of water in it. And right now, some album is playing at a volume that makes me nuts, but I haven’t said a word of even rolled an eye.
Can’t you have an ongoing ‘directive’ in your head that is something like “if I feel like he’s doing X again, and I should not tolerate it even though I always do, and I should tell him to stop doing X, check if I’m in my PMS days. If yes, wait a couple days. If not, tell him to stop doing X”
This sounds naively simple, but something like this helps people who have panic attacks. When people are having panic attacks, they really think they are about to die. When the attack is over, they see that that was an overreaction. Over time, they think like “I feel like I’m going to die, and I remember that I felt exactly like this before, and I did not die, so I need to just relax and not be afraid”. It doesn’t work on the first time, but on the 100th time of going through this, it becomes “Oh, it’s that familiar feeling again” and the panic attack stops before it even begins. This may not work for everyone, but it does for quite a few I think.
Isn’t this something that can be applied to the “OMG everyone’s suddenly being deliberately mean/rude to me and I shall not take it” feeling that comes and goes with PMS?
Could some of this phenomenon be explained by women putting up with too much and avoiding conflict during non-PMS days, and this creates pent-up and suppressed anger (even though they don’t feel angry when not in PMS). And then when PMS arrives, the pent-up anger comes out.
Is it possible that if women were to rationally and calmly voice their objections to their partner’s or others’ minor and medium annoyances on a regular basis, and not put up with so much and staying silent to “keep the peace”, then there wouldn’t be as many pent-up grievances that rise to the surface during PMS?
Hey now! Clearly there is still water in that pitcher!
You only need to refill the pitcher when it’s completely, bone-dry, empty.
First, even if you have a 5 hour meeting with the CEO, you will still not start shouting at him/her, you will be on your best behavior.
Second, regardless of whether it is 5 minutes or 5 hours, the fact that you are able to not be bitchy towards him/her means that it is under your conscious control. Maybe it takes a lot of effort, but if you know how important it is to you to not be bitchy towards your CEO, you will control yourself and not be bitchy towards him/her, even if you are PMS’ing.
So it seems that if you are bitchy towards your husband/boyfriend when you are PMS’ing it means that it’s not as important for you to not be bitchy towards your husband/boyfriend as it is to not be bitchy towards your CEO.
Basically, it’s not that it’s beyond your control, it’s just that you make the decision that it’s not worth the effort to ensure you don’t hurt your loved ones.
You don’t have to keep up any facade. It’s OK if you seem down and not feeling well. No one is expecting you to be all cheery all the time. But it’s not OK to use those times of feeling down and feeling bad to take it out on your husband or other loved ones.
And here is the root of the problem. From several posters in this thread it seems that a lot of women have decided that it’s their God-given-right to lash out at loved ones when feeling crappy/moody/hormonal, and their loved ones should just accept it and live with it and make do with, at most, apologies for the terrible behavior.
Thankfully, there are several women in this thread who don’t feel this way, and don’t take their bad moods out on their loved ones.
God bless you Polerius. Keep fighting the good fight. Though using logic in a PMS thread is probably a lost cause 
Why is it called PMS?
Because Mad Cow was taken.
I assume that on days when not suffering from PMS, people can be reasoned with
I’m not really a screamer/thrower in terms of PMS so that’s not really an issue, but I will cop to having sent some work-related emails in the past that I probably wouldn’t have sent were I not suffering from PMS. This is when I was much younger and still learning how to deal with it appropriately. I mean, it wasn’t along the lines of cursing the boss out or anything. Just, somewhat inappropriately emotional for work, which I recognized in retrospect even though at the time it seemed logical enough.
These days, when I know PMS is upon me, I try to avoid sending any critical job-related correspondence if I’m feeling even the slightest bit irritated or anxious. I also avoid other human beings as much as possible. Sometimes I’ll find myself beginning to unload a lot of anxieties and complaints on my husband (often not husband-related; just stuff that’s bugging me in general), and I’ll usually stop myself partway through after realizing, oh, this is probably hormonal. I say, “I’m sorry, this is probably hormonal” and he makes sympathetic noises and asks if I want tea, and I say yes, and then I burst into tears because I’m so happy/grateful that he understands, and he tries not to visibly roll his eyes in front of me, and I am even more appreciative that he is not being all eye-rolly right where I can see him, and then I go sit down with my tea and get weepy over flash mob videos.
Polerius, out of curiosity, do you have someone in your life that in your opinion is taking out a lot of frustration and anger on you? I am only wondering because you seem strangely…invested in this topic.
Could you ask your husband to share some tips on controlling the deadly eye rolling reflex?
I take my beagles to the park for a long walk and hopefully come back when she is taking a nap.
When she wakes up, i go play racketball.
She will sit and watch" Dancing with the the Stars " and most popular shows. I go downstairs and watch the ballgames.
When she is in a bad mood it is ugly. I have to hang a porkchop around her neck to get the dogs to play with her.
I’m not young anymore (I mean, 43 does count as middle aged, or do I need to wait until I’m menopausic?), but I don’t see why should I “temper” a factual answer of “I don’t get PMS, my mother, aunts and grandmas didn’t get PMS, my sister in law gets migraines :(”
It’s like tempering “pure water under 1atm pressure freezes at 0ºC”.