Why? 'Cus I’m a big freak? 
Susan and her SO are married now…I guess SO is just easier to type than husband
Also, I think she’s mentioned that her husband is averse to any sort of counseling, etc. Which is why I’m sitting over here trying to send good vibes across 2000 miles.
Of course you are, and I don’t blame you. I do think that you have to make it clear to hubby that the “meanness” thing has to stop, right now.
If he persists in talking that way during disagreements, I think you should refuse to engage him. Get up and leave. I imagine he’ll learn pretty quickly that being obnoxious and condescending doesn’t work anymore. 
We were absolutely horrible arguers back in the drinking days. Breaking everything, screaming, and…eventually serious physical violence. It can change. We both have changed our ways. We might get loud, but we don’t insult and if the argument gets a little too warm, we simply stop and pick it up later.
I know that this happens a lot with him. He’s be mad at himself, or tired, or whatever. However since I’m available his frustrations are directed at me.
Thank you for contributing Kalhoun. I know that you’ve been through a lot worse than me in this regard. I actually was in an abusive relationship for about 2 years at one point. It’s still a struggle to know when I’m standing up for myself and when I’m letting my past relationship influence my present one.
I know…it’s a hard balance. It might help for us to understand what you argue about. Is it money or kids or housework (or lack thereof) or politics? Me and Mr. K are very opinionated and often at opposite ends of the spectrum. Sometimes when it starts getting loud, either one of us will just stop and say “and we’re living proof that opposites attract!” It can get so out of proportion in just a short time.
We don’t argue over big things. Money, religion, in-laws, etc we have very mature rational discussions about.
Many of our fights right now are over typical newlywed things: how warm to keep our apartment, shoes on or off, navigating in the car, how to do the dishes, how long I leave the door open when I go outside (really). Really little stuff. That’s why it’s so confusing to me that he gets upset over them. I realize that many of these issues are really about respect/power than anything else, but they seem like such small things to potentially damage our relationship over.
Also, many of our arguments are over what this thread is about: what kind of behavior is acceptable when you are in a bad mood.
You’re sounding better and better. If you’re ever out Los Angeles way again, the offer of a drink (at minimum) is a standing one.
Stranger
My husband and I don’t fight. We might disagree on certain things, but we respect each other and love each other and VALUE each other so highly, that we have never let a discussion disintegrate into shouting or name-calling or anything like that. We don’t pout or sulk, we don’t retaliate, we don’t badmouth each other to our friends and family.
Our relationship is of paramount importance to both of us, and we consistently treat it as such.
I myself have three rules, one a bit PC and psychological and everything, and the other perhaps the opposite, and the third the toughest.
First, don’t define the other, like “you are [this and that]” – in any sense – because that’ll only spark fire; express how you feel, why you react the way you do, when you get the impression the other is, do, etc. This often takes the heat out, and of course is much easier said than done.
Second, leave. If the argument gets all messed up, leave, and come back later (a couple of hours); because when the argument gets going, both of you loses control over what is said and done; and you will regret that, but you wouldn’t regret going away to by some milk instead.
Thirdly, always go back to yourself, because you can’t change he other, and work on your own negative feelings, not the other’s; keep the fire inside yourself to transform yourself, and look at yourself – not the other.
(Of course, if the other is a real sob, leave forever, but this is presuming both are in fact good people.)
I have nothing to offer that’s going to be nearly as helpful as what’s been written here, but the advice I have to share did come from a counselor . . .
You see, I used to not be able to handle people yelling AT ALL (in anger, I mean - if we’re 50 feet away from each other in a crowded stadium and you’re trying to find out if I want mustard on my hot dog, by all means do yell). Even if it wasn’t directed at me, it made my gut clench and I’d have to get THEEEE HELL away from the situation. So you can imagine how I felt when someone did yell AT ME. (And FWIW, I don’t know where my sensitivity came from. My dad was not a yeller, but my mom was, and my Nana (who had a huge hand in raising me) was, too. Heck, Nana had to change her whole M.O. with me when I was a kid. She kept to her usual yell-o-rama M.O. with my cousins, though, and I spent half my childhood thinking she must hate them with the fire of a thousand suns. But I digress.) So I went to exactly ONE counseling session in order to figure out how to deal with it (because, as Wakinyan said, the only behavior you can really change is your own).
The counselor advised me to pretend I was the Batmobile.
No, seriously - she referred to that Batman movie where Batman (Michael Keaton, maybe?) gets out of the Batmobile and clicks a little remote, and the Batmobile instantly covers itself in a layer of armour. She said if there were a way that I could sort of do that mentally in situations where there was yelling - in other words, prevent myself from internalizing it - maybe I could learn to be OK with it.
And then she said she didn’t see any reason for me to come back. :eek:
She did call a few months later to see how I was faring, but I didn’t know - I hadn’t been yelled at.
I can’t really say that I ever used that technique (at least not consciously), but for some reason I seem to be OK (well, better, at least) with yelling now.
Now if only I could learn to deal with people telling me to shut up . . . 
The rules about fighting in our house, in a simple form a guy who doesn’t like all this pshychological stuff can understand:
-It’s bout fixing something together, not winning/losing
-No generalization: “You always… / I never…”
-No calling anyone anything: "Your’e such a … "
-problems must be stated in terms of "feelings of the person speaking, or in terms of possible bad effects on the household:
“When you do this, I feel like that e.g: When you leave wet towels on the bed, I feel grossed out about being in our bedroom”
or: “When you leave wet towels on the bed, they can’t dry out, and get all mouldy & mildewy, which can make us sick”
-Person receiving the complaint must be able to re-state it back to the person making the complaint in such a way as to show they really understand it before starting to respond to it.
-Stature of limitations is 1 week; if you don’t feel strongly enough about something to talk about it within seven days of it happening, you don’t feel strongly enough about it to make a fuss about it. Stockpiling of minor infractions for ammunition in another argument is prohibited.
Most of our fights are about little things as well. We never fight about money, but I’m continually pissed off about him tracking wet boots through the kitchen, walking around the open dishwasher to put a dish in the sink (he doesn’t know how to load it), how he managed to misplace the recipe for ICE CUBES, me leaving lights on, moving his stuff, or leaving the computer on because I know I’m going to be back to it in an hour or so. Of course, there are bigger issues as well, but the petty crap was the stuff that escalated. And you’re right…it was about power.
Based on what you said in your letter, I’m going to go out on a limb and say he really enjoys intellectual discussion, but he hates emotional discussion. You’re probably much better at understanding what you feel, and why, than he is; you have even leapt ahead of him in the conversation to conclude what he feels, because he’s slow to arrive at that conclusion on his own.
This seems pretty typical for the way men and women tend (not) to relate to each other. Women are (generally speaking) much more fluent in the language of emotion than are men and, surprising as it may sound, many men (again, generally speaking) think compartmentally, have trouble shifting gears, and have a hard time knowing what they are feeling! It takes (most) men much more time and concentration to hold an emotional discussion than it does (most) women.
It’s sort of like you’re both diving for pearls at a depth of 50 feet, but you have a mask and a scuba tank, and a flashlight, and an underwater message board. You can freely and easily go down and get a pearl, discuss strategies, go back to the boat, and stay at any depth at any time — but he can’t go halfway down. He has to hold his breath and dive down slowly, all in one go, and find the pearl in the dark. If he gets interrupted, he has to go all the way back to the surface again. (This may be why he gave you that sarcastic retort about how you obviously know what he’s feeling — you hit him with so many emotional deductions, so quickly, that you were swimming circles around him. He didn’t have enough time to emotionally process your answers before you asked him for more.)
This may or may not apply to your situation — I’ve made a lot of assumptions and stated some generalities here which may be wrong — but if you’re asking him for an emotional response, you may have to bite your lip and shut the hell up while he works it out for himself. You may know exactly what he feels — you’re the pearl-diver with the flashlight and mask, after all, and you can see exactly what he’s doing — but he needs to be emotionally in touch with his answer, and to do that, he has to get that pearl himself, no matter how long it takes him (and regardless how long you have to keep quiet, watching him flounder his way there).
A very interesting pair of books on the subject of how men and women communicate are “What Women Want Men To Know” and “Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know,” (linked on same page) both by Barbara deAngelis. Speaking as a man who’s read both and loved them, I admit most of what she says about how we men communicate is very true, and couldn’t possibly hurt to read.
That applies to him, too — these aren’t books for you alone. 
Not that odd to me. Only in one of my relationships have I fought with him (I love to debate, and hate to fight). I’m so like my parents like that - in twenty-four years of marriage they only had one fight (over whether or not my dad would go to Iraq to report on Gulf War I when his kids were nine and seven) despite my dad’s being a notorious hothead.
As a guy who’s been in some argumentative but loving relationships, I’ll respond to your letter as if I’d gotten it:
I really would like to talk about what happened Tuesday night and what seems to happen in all of our fights now. Maybe you’re right, but generalizing like this puts me on the defensive. Even if it doesn’t happen all the time, your points are equally valid or invalid Even though the outcomes have been ok up till now, I think we have some very destructive patterns. I’m worried about our future if we can’t change them. Implied threat here—I’d skip this, too
Marriage is hard, and it’s even harder to keep love alive in a marriage. We can’t afford to beat up our love all the time over relatively trivial problems. You sound like you’re calling problems I take seriously “trivial” ones—this hurts my feelings. You also sound like you’re not happy with the whole idea of marriage—if it’s too hard for you, the door’s that way. I’d like to know if this is something you’d be willing to work on with me. How about “I know you love me, and you’re willing to work on making things better with us”—that’s not threatening and makes the same point anyway. If he’s not willing, let him say so, but be friendly and optimistic. It seems like you’re not interested in talking about it unless we’re already fighting and you’re mad. Telling him what his behavior “seems like” is an error, I think: I’d phrase it more like “Fixing how we fight when we’re in mid-fight is hard to do, so I’d like to work on this when we’re both feeling calm. “Mad” means both crazy and angry—not the best choice of words. It’s also very easy for me to see the mistakes you make, and much harder to see my own. I need your help to see my part in this - I’ve been trying to figure it out on my own and the conclusions I come to just seems to make you madder.
I’d really like to understand what goes through your head when we fight. For instance, on Tuesday when /////I was throwing out ideas as to why you were behaving the way you were toward me, I was trying to get a confirmation or correction or some indication that I was on the right track so that I could understand you better. Instead you clammed up and when I pushed you to talk //////you just said, “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you? It doesn’t matter what I say because you want to see it this way.” I’d drop all the stuff between the virgules (and the “just”) and I’d continue with “…that hurt my feelings because it does matter to me what you say, it matters a lot. I have your best interests at heart here, and I’d much rather be happy with you than win an argument.”
That really hurt. It still hurts. It hurts because it means that you don’t believe that I have our - your - best interests at heart. It hurts because it means that you think I’m more concerned with me being right than us being happy. And the sarcasm really hurts because it means you are more interested in wounding me than fixing the problem. I’d drop this paragraph, and I’d end on a positive note like “Whenever we don’t see eye-to-eye, which will happen sometimes, I want you feel assured at every moment that you’re arguing with someone who loves you deeply and wants the best for you, and I could tolerate fighting with you much better if I could get that assurance from you.”
I want us to stay open to each other, even when we’re not getting along. I want to be able to still touch and reassure even when we’re having an argument. I don’t want to have to protect myself from you ever, and it’s disheartening to think that you feel the need to protect yourself from me.
I’m open to specific, concrete suggestions about how I can make our fights less painful, less damaging and less frequent.
Thanks for the advice pseudotriton. In your ‘loving but argumentative’ relationships are usually the calm one?
I’m going to add something to what I wrote last night, again with the caveat that it could well be way off base — not everybody behaves the same, not all men are the same, your mannage may vary, etc.
A line in your letter caught my eye: that you want to know what’s going through his head. This is also (according to that pair of books I linked) a common complaint of women about their men, that many men tend to internalize their thinking to later announce only the end product, where many women tend to announce the thinking process and arrive at the end product aloud. As a result, some women feel cut off, or shut out, from their husband’s thoughts and feelings because he won’t immediately begin talking. (And also as a result, men may feel that women talk too much — but that’s why there are two books, one about men and one about women.) He may not come to his emotional realizations as you do — that is to say, working them out in words, aloud — so what you see as silence may be just watching him churn away at the answer.
The good news is, he can learn to talk aloud, if you give him space to do so. He may have to overcome a certain amount of fear that he’ll hurt you by saying something that isn’t perfect and 100% true when he opens his big mouth.
I really do recommend those two books. It really opened my eyes to the different ways men and women (tend to) communicate (in general, caveat lector, not available in Minnesota don’tcha know). And this is from a man who hates reading gushy books on relationships, but I found both were extremely accessible and clear and fair.
I’d say so, but I’m sure I’d get a hell of an argument there.