Well then that changes everything. Sometimes an apology is all that is needed–and sometimes it needs more then that–your friends situation sounds like one in which an apology didn’t work. For the record, I personally wouldn’t have expected a simple apology to resolve this either. He did insult her and in that case he should have listened to her concerns. But I was under the misimpression that she hadn’t said anything that night. That fact changes the whole scenario for me.
An example of when an apology is all that is needed–One time my wife left for work before me and grabbed my keys by mistake. I woke up and didn’t have the key to my car. I was not a happy guy, but I called her up and said ‘whose keys do you have’—and she said on her end it all came crystal clear as to why the key didn’t fit the car that morning until she tried the other key. She immediately (and I mean immediately) apologized. What am I going to do–still be upset? First off it was a mistake (not an insult like your friends example) and she apologized. If I stayed upset, frankly I would be the jerk in the situation. I appreciated her owning up to it as that wouldn’t have happened in my previous marriage. In that marriage it would have been my fault for leaving my keys out where she could grab them! :rolleyes:
But if in your friends case she wanted to talk right then–I withdraw all my comments then
Well, the problem MAY not, but often it does. In the example given, a discussion could result in appropriate boundaries being set, which is important whether this was the first time such a thing had happened or the latest in a series.
An appropriate boundary is, “No personal attacks just because you’re having a bad morning.” The husband’s behavior was unacceptable to the wife, and she has every right to tell him so. Useful discussion could also revolve around whether or not the couple needs to shift the distribution of the household’s burdens. I don’t think either discussion needs to revolve around feelings, but could instead focus on desired and expected behaviors.
What if the thing that they’re doing is saying really hurtful things? My feelings are quite important, thank you very much. If my intimate partner has no problem hurting my feelings, then we have a serious problem.
I’m reading this thread and being reminded of a number of past relationships with guys who have, when angry, struck out at me with nasty and unrelated words. They said things that were very hurtful to me.
It was important for me that they knew that what they said was hurtful. My feelings on the matter were quite important, because I will not be verbally abused by someone I am intimate with. I understand that people get frustrated and arguments happen, but it is vital that the person I am in a relationship with has productive ways to deal with that which don’t include saying hurtful things to me.
The purpose of having the “when you said XX it really hurt me” conversation was to (a) make sure they know that I was hurt by it (because people don’t always know that they’re hurting someone); and (b) to find out how likely it was that this sort of hurtful language would continue.
Inevitably the conversation would end with them saying “I’m so sorry I said something hurtful, it was just because I was angry, it won’t happen again.” However, in each case they were not able to do this, and continued the pattern of being angry about something, and saying something hurtful (sometimes deliberately), and then tearfully apologizing. Rinse and repeat.
So who is the emotional communicator? The person who (in anger) calls their lover selfish and toxic and tells them to “fuck off” (or whatever ugly words you choose), and then gets mad when their lover is hurt by this? Or the person who gets hurt by being called selfish and toxic and told to fuck off?
That doesn’t make any sense. If you have a “problem” with something your spouse is doing, that is a feeling. If the feeling isn’t a bad one, you don’t have a problem.
Most behaviors aren’t objectively bad or good. When they impact others, how those others feel about the behaviors matters. If someone doesn’t mind being yelled at, yelling at them is fine. If they do mind, it isn’t. Those are “feelings.”
Nobody in this thread has actually answered ‘what’ needs to be discussed, just that ‘there needs to be a discussion’.
Which is exactly the kind of thing that makes a person who operats in this ‘We need to talk’ kind of way so damn irritating.
I pay for my own place to live, all of my student loans, my car (well, not anymore since it’s paid off), and everything else I need. Now, why would I, personally, ever need two car payments?
And don’t say ‘because that’s what happens when you’re married.’ It is not necessarily so. Some people, instead of both going together to get two different cars, each purchase their own car, thus each of them has one car payment to their name.
As for this, I don’t know what your definition of ‘quite well’ is, but when I just started out I handled my own housing (and I choose to rent rather than buy. That’s not going to change), bought my furniture, bought my car, bought everything else I needed to live or used what I had accumulated during college. I don’t have kids and never will regardless of marriage, but I also am not in the position of an 18 year-old kid with no more than a high school education and an McJob.
You seem to think that unless you’re married, you don’t have to ‘start out’ or establish anything, or know anything about how expensive it is to set up your own household. Not true at all.
So what exactly would be the point of further discussion? What is the actual issue, specifically, that has to be discussed? What is the goal of another discussion about what he said?
In that situation you have a choice to make regarding whether or not you want to stay with 'em or not. You make take that as others have, that it means I don’t give a shit about my SO. It doesn’t. It means I know that you can’t change someone else, only whether or not you are around them.
Ah but in the example here, fessie told us that the guy did already apologize. Was he wrong for doing it before she told him why he should apologize?
What some of us are saying here is that there are women (at least in my experience it’s never been a man) who bring shit up after what YOU have called the end of the issue, the part where the guy said he’s sorry, even if it is a minor issue. The ones who do this needling crap do it over everything. They’re the ones who, if you left a wet towel on the bathroom floor today will bring up that you burnt the toast last week or spilled ketchup on the rug three months ago.
I gave list of possible topics. You continue to ignore them, or you have a dismissive answer about why they don’t really need to be discussed. As if discussions themselves are inherently bad and need to be avoided, which is absurd.
All I’m going to say is, don’t marry someone with bad credit.
There was no INITIAL discussion of what he said, so how could there be ANOTHER one? She brought it up, he said, “Didn’t mean that, sorry.” And then refused to discuss it further. She was all torqued up about it and then blocked from expressing anything. That’s tough to take.
This is definitely true but… the situation you are in changes, and when that happens, you might be just finding out how your SO feels about it. That’s how people “grow apart.” If he’s an abusive jerk, then you might hope that his attitude will change through discussion rather than get divorced. It’s rather an optimistic view, I agree.
I think it’s worth knowing why the person apologized. Sometimes apologies are insincere, I’m sure you know that. Sometimes a discussion of the underlying reason for the offense might prevent future offenses. If fessie’s friend’s husband knew how badly he hurt his wife, maybe he’d think twice about shooting off his mouth in anger, or would apologize sooner rather than letting her suffer with it all day.
Well, clearly the former is the one acting inappropriately. If someone believes their lover is selfish and toxic, they should explain that to them calmly and without anger, giving examples to support their statement. Then their lover should evaluate the claims, and either accept them and endeavor to change their behavior, or attempt to rebut them. Hopefuly, this can be done without overt emotional displays by either side.
Unfortunately, I’ve found that this is unlikely in practice.
If you stepped on some stranger’s foot on your way into an elevator, then “Oops, sorry” is all that’s called for.
But if you’re in an intimate relationship with someone who says, angrily, “You are an inadequate partner!” - you don’t think that merits further explaining? “Oops, sorry” doesn’t get it done.
How is she to trust what he says, if he’s apt to say just about anything?
It’s not like all live in a LaLaLand where nobody ever divorces, lies or cheats. How can she tell when he’s being authentic if he won’t own his emotions?
We’ve all heard the stories “Everything was fine - until I got the divorce papers.”
Dinsdale, you’ve been absent from this one for a while – I’m curious whether the scenario with my friend is familiar to you, or if this has gone in a direction that’s not at all what you had in mind.
That’s not true, I did, in fact you quoted it in your own post.
So in other words, what needs to be discussed is if he is likely to keep saying hurtful things, and if so, whether I want to stay with him or not. I feel it’s only fair to give him the opportunity to know he’s hurting me and to decide not to do it again.
This is precisely my point. Since all we have are anecdotes, I’m offering my anecdote that for me, it has been men who fly off the handle and say horrible things in anger, then tearfully beg for an apology, while I (the female) calmly says “I will not be spoken to in that way; if you have a legitimate concern please bring it up respectfully,” and ends the relationship when no improvement is reached after several such conversations.
I am trying to say that “emotional” vs “rational” communicators are not in any way divided along gender lines.
I would say that what needs to be discussed are two things: 1. the guy using her as a verbal punching bag in the morning. and 2. his assumption that 1. is ok and that saying, “sorry” makes it all better.
Ideally, this could be done in a calm manner, with lots of “I” statements, wisdom, maturity and respect. But then the main characters would have to stop for a commercial break or a pledge drive, now wouldn’t they…
I’ll own up to being emotional during “talks” but one thing I am not is passive/aggressive. My husband excels are p/a. Which of us is more “rational” or “logical”? Neither-I don’t think you can put such a broad label on something as complex as human behavior.
So you don’t care if they really think that you are an inadequate partner and this will result in more arguments or that they take out their frustration on you. I would see those as problems.
I haven’t claimed they were. Apparently, though, there are some studies that suggest there are gender differences in communication. I’m not really familiar with them, though. Ultimately, though, it’s not a gender issue, but a maturity issue.
I guess it’s just hard for me to imagine someone blurting out a statement they didn’t mean at all, y’know? Do we say utterly ridiculous things in anger (“You’re personally responsible for global warming, planet wrecker!”), or do we say things that have a shred of truth?
That’s not to say he necessarily secretly hates her – maybe, perhaps, he just wishes sometimes that she could magically fix things for him (the way his mother took care of him when he was a child)? Or maybe he’s ashamed of himself for not being able to support his family better (like his father did) and is projecting his anger onto her? No way of telling, if he won’t discuss it.
I still don’t see the need for a discussion. It won’t necessarily mean a damn thing with whether or not a person continues to say mean things, and whether or not you want to stay is something you have to figure out for yourself.
I can’t recall ever discussing with someone if I want to stay with them.
If they apologize on their own, without me saying anything to them about it, then I take it to mean they are aware it was out of line, and why, or they wouldn’t be apologizing. I’m not going to sit someone down after they say ‘I was wrong. I’m sorry.’ and give them a ‘Do you know why it was wrong? Do you know how it made me feel? I’m going to tell you, and you’re not going to like hearing this.’
Only if it’s a long drawn out discussion … which I still do not see the point of. All that ‘I statement’ therapy psycho-babble annoys the shit out of me. This society talks every damn thing to death. Talk shows, talk therapy, talk to me, we have to talk, talk talk talk talk.
More talking does not necessarily make anything better.
If that’s what they really think, it will be evident in more ways than one, and there won’t be too many more arguments before the relationship is over.
People can say I bail too easily. Let 'em. I never met a person I was willing to be unhappy for.
I wouldn’t either, after seeing the most important person in my life flip out on me that day.
Or maybe she was being considerate of his feelings by not shooting down his apology immediately. After blowing up like that, it takes some cojones to come back and say “Hey, I was a real asshole. It was wrong of me to do that and I’m sorry.” I think it was nice of her not to counter it right then and there; he’d just be put on the defensive and nobody would get anywhere.
How about the fact that he’s taking his anger out on her in the first place? That’s not fair, unless she does it to him and he just stews about it–which would be another thing that needs resolution. The underlying issue still needs to be dealt with, especially if this is a pattern.
I agree that that would be a useless conversation to have. If I were the wife in this situation, I’d sit him down and ask him if he really, totally didn’t mean it or if there was a grain of truth to it. I’d ask, if there was a grain of truth, if he needs me to get an outside job. If he didn’t like that idea, I’d talk with him about how we can lighten the money issues so that he’s not so stressed that he has to lash out in anger. I would make sure he knew that it’s important to me that these issues are solved not only to make him happier, but because of the effects his behaviors have on the family. I would try to make him understand that I’d like him to come to me with problems before they escalate into outbursts. Hopefully, all of this would result in concrete actions that would lessen his stress and make my life a little less harrowing (which is what it would be if my husband was screaming at me out of the blue).
Geez, threads like this make me soooooo thankful for my husband.
Have you never yelled at someone because you were mad about something completely unrelated?
I think everybody does it on occasion, and I would just accept the apology and the explanation as is and move on.
And if I were the one who someone was trying to ‘sit down’ and question, I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t want to participate in that. I would consider it needling, particularly after I had said ‘I don’t actually want you to get a job, and I’m not mad at you, I was just mad. It was wrong, and I’m sorry.’
I don’t expect someone to interrogate me to find out what I really meant. I would find it extremely insulting that someone would give me that ‘you need my help to not be stressed, whether you want it or not’ kind of talk. I don’t talk about problems that are inside my head. An external problem that can be solved, I will solve. And I would prefer to discuss it with someone who won’t ever ask me how I ‘feel’ about it. Stress is not something that I discuss, and no matter how much someone insisted, it never will be. The only destination for that train is that their insistence on ‘I have to help you deal with your feelings’ results in me getting fed up and just wanting them to get lost for good.
Other people do not have to agree with me. They do, however, have to accept that I will never be a ‘talk my problems and feelings out as if I’m on Oprah’ kind of person.
I can’t help but wonder why you’re here, posting, if you’re completely self-contained, content with your answers, and willing to tell all non-takers to fuck off. What’s the point?
