Who's in the wrong here?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Husband and I are in the car, him in the drivers seat, driving on the highway. It is two hours before rush hour and there is not much traffic.

We need some info from his smartphone, it might have been the GPS that didn’t work right, or some contact info that didn’t come up as instructed. Anyway, I try to find it, I don’t succeed.

Husband grabs the smartphone and says, lemmehandlethat.
He tries to work the smartphone, one eye on the road, but more then 50 % of his attention on the device.

I freak out and tell him to mind the road, this is dangerous. Husband says no, I got this, I’m nearly done. Then continues to tinker some more. I really freak out and say, stop, we’ll park somewhere and then you can work that damned thing. Husband doesn’t listen.

I grab the phone from his hands and hold on to it. He hits my leg in angry frustration, not hard enough to leave a bruise, but hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.

Then I give him the silent treatment for the next 5 miles.

Okay, what did we both do wrong?

Inspired by this thread, that kinda shocked me in the harshness of the responses. That thread made me think, well, if that is called domestic abuse, most couples I know abuse each other on a monthly basis. If such instances would merit police intervention and a divorce, there wouldn’t be many marriages left.

2

He was wrong to try and use the device while driving.
He hit your leg in anger to cause you pain?
Did the tears well up from his anger - or the physical hitting?
Not that he should hit you either way, but I’ve been in plenty of relation ships that may have devolved similarly as long as the hitting isn’t serious.
I think you are entitled to use silent treatment, but figured the Dutch would use Kilometers…

In my mind - when two couples are debating about safety - you should always go with the safer option being proposed. As long as everything isn’t made about safety. Compromising should be for other things.

3

What could you have possibly done wrong from what you described?

Most people you know hit their spouses? WTF.

You read that book from the other thread too. Everyone read it!

4

Further proof that marriage is EVIL!!! :mad:

Two seconds with such an abusive jackass, and I’d be out the door. Do it now while you still can. You’re lucky he didn’t drive your automobile into a bridge support while dicking around with his mobile, or worse.*

And then to put the onus on you is the height of douchebaggery. What possible advantage can there be for you to continue this farce?

*Hopefully, you would have had the airbag.

5

Well, there’s the matter of us having a young kid, and a house together we can’t sell for shit.

And the fact that mostly, we get along as reasonably well as can be expected from two tired and stressed out working parents with each their own baggage.

And the fact that usually, I give as good as I get when it comes to other forms of abuse. You haven’t been on the receiving end of true resentful sarcasm untill I’ve ranted to you and about you, trust me.

Yes, it would be nice if we equally did our best to respect each other and take care of each other. We don’t. But whatever the B-minus version of that ideal marriage is, we have it and there is a balance.

6

Pain. It hurt like a mofo.
And you’re right, I think safety should prevail as long as you don’t deal with somebody with unrealistic standards.

7

Holy shit! I would maybe say that grabbing the phone from him was wrong but your life was literally in danger so I can’t really say you did the wrong thing after pleading with him to give it back to you.

And then he hit you hard enough to make your eyes well up with tears? That’s some messed up crap.

I hated it when my boyfriend would do things on the phone while driving. I hounded him about it all the time. He didn’t like it at first but when he saw how important it really was to me, how I feared for his life and his safety, he eventually came around for the most part. Sometimes when he would call me I would ask if he was driving and if he said yes, I would tell him to hang up and talk to me later.

I agree with you 100% that you should not be operating a phone while driving a car. If you’re stopped a red light, and you want to fidget a little bit with a GPS for directions or whatever, that’s excusable. But seriously, no no no.

Frankly I think he needs to go to counseling over hitting you. If you were just dating this guy, I would presume that would be the last time you would ever see him. But of course as you admit, things aren’t so simple. Counseling may help.

8

[In the voice of Beverly Hofstadter]: You’ve rationalized that very well. :rolleyes:

9

I’d like to hear his version of what happened first.

10

I would normally say snatching an item from someone else is childish, but when it’s distracting to the point at which you feel your life could be at risk, I would probably have done the same thing. S as the facts are stated he was wrong for not handing over the phone, pulling over and hitting you hard.

What’s not clear is the nature of the conversation proceeding this - you know him and what happens better than any of us, but you could have been provoking him into stubbornly holding onto the phone in some way. Not that this excuses his behaviour, but it’s sometimes worth replaying things in your head to see if you could have defused the situation any earlier, particularly when you know you are in a relationship where communication is an issue and you have no foreseeable way out of it.

11

Certainly you were totally in the right and he was totally in the wrong. He was being an idiot about the phone, and you did the right thing to grab it, and no way was he justified in hitting you. I certainly hope he is very contrite. If not, that is a bad sign.

However, I don’t think the bang on the leg necessarily has to be a big deal. It is really down to how you feel about it, and about him, now. You know him and we don’t. If it makes you feel scared of him, and you are seriously concerned he might soon do worse, or might get in the habit of doing as much on a fairly frequent basis, then that is one thing. You should probably get out. On the other hand, just because it is the fashion in some circles to stigmatize every male who ever once raises a finger against a woman under any circumstances as an irredeemable abuser, that does not mean you have to. As you say, few marriages, or heterosexual relationships of any kind would survive for long at all if some people’s inflexible standards were applied (certainly not if the same sort of unforgiving standards that they want to apply to the men were equally applied to the women). It really all comes down to whether, in your judgement, the hit (in particular) was a momentary and uncharacteristic aberration on his part (everybody freaks out and does stupid and uncharacteristic things sometimes), or whether you think it (in the context of the incident as a whole) was a revelation of a previously unsuspected but integral aspect of his character. Unfortunately, nobody here is gong to be reliably able to tell you which is the case (at least not on the basis of what you have said so far, and probably not at all).

12

In most cases of accounts of arguments, I would agree with that, but in this case, unless Maastricht is lying her ass off, I don’t see any way that his behavior could be justified.

The only rider would be that if he is refusing to admit that he was anything but badly in the wrong, then that is very bad. Unfortunately, if he is acting all contrite, it does not prove much either way (even if he means it).

13

Grabbing the phone back could have increased the chances of crashing. You had every right to be worried, but what you did may not have made things safer in that instance. Unfortunately, sometimes its more a hostage situation in cars when someone else is driving where you have to choose the least risky option, and then address it afterwards.

There is domestic abuse that is wrong but does not necessarily mean theres an overall experience of fear to the point that the relationship cant be salvaged. Hitting you to the point of tears from the pain is assault, and illegal in many settings. Doing this while driving could have killed or seriously injured you both physically - you’d need to be awfully good at sarcasm to get to an equivalent level of risk.

Regardless of what provocation was involved, he has no right to physically hit you as a solution or to put you in situations of major physical risk like that. I suspect your major problem is less whether what he did was wrong and more ‘what do I do about this’, ie concerns whether that this means you have to leave, or where do you go from here in how to try and address it. Regardless of your own shortcomings, he has to take responsibility for his own behaviour, or its likely to reoccur.

One useful metric might be how comfortable talking to your friends and family about his behaviour and what their reactions might be to it. Counselling as a sounding board and general reactions here would be another.

14

To judge the value of contrition, I suggest you watch The Burning Bed sometime. Yes, it is a dramatization, but one that’s uncomfortably close to real life.

15

He was acting somewhat contrite afterwards. Along the lines of; “well, I shouldn’t have hit you, but you shouldn’t have grabbed the phone.”

That was several months ago. In his defense, he has stopped tinkering while driving. As long as our worst fights seem to have some permanent learning effects, I guess they are worth it.

I did speak to my best friend about it and she said her boyfriend also tinkered while driving, and it also drove her nuts. We agreed it seemed to be a guy thing, to tinker your gadgets into submission the moment they break down and the spouse/other person in the car can’'t seem to fix it. There’s a challenge ! And the added challenge for the guy to show that he’s enough Master of the Automobile to do it while driving.

I’m a bit ashamed to ad that our four-year old was in the backseat while this happened. He told us sternly to cut it out. He used the same voice his kindergarten teacher uses to break up kids’ spats, so I hope and guess for him it wasn’t really frightening. He certainly didn’t seem frightened, just a little righteous toddler indignation. Which he wasn’t afraid to voice.

16

This happened months ago? And you’re bringing it up now? :eek: :rolleyes:

17

I don’t see why it should be freshly happened.

My thread was triggered by the other thread where a shove and pulling out the car-key-while-driving was cause enough for the woman calling the cops on her husband, and Dopers to come in and say: “Yup, your marriage is dead, lawyer up already”.

I was the only one in that tread saying “Hey, stuff like that actually sounds quite normal to me”. And I wanted to check if something similar that happened to us wold get the same reaction or not.

And I thought a perspective on a very similar event as in the other thread, but months after emotions had cooled down, would be an interesting pendant. I think the fall-out and follow-up (lessons learned, changed-or-not attitudes) of such emotional events are more interesting then the heat-of-the-moment stuff, anyway, but that may just be me.

Also, I thought it interesting to mention the “men tinkering gadgets while driving and spouses freaking out”-situation, as at least one Doper and me and my friend mentioned it happening and me wondering how common that was.

18

Yes, some men tinker with their phones while they drive. Of the men who tinker, fewer punch their wives.

19

He was wrong, pretty obviously.

But statements to the effect “Most men hit their wives, I guess this is just normal” are very typical of domestic abuse victims.

In general, normally-adjusted adults don’t hit each other at all, much less so within a marriage, and especially over something like this.

20

So he thinks his dad hitting his mom isn’t a big deal. That’s not actually a good sign.