Mfmg Member Profile

...See more I've been with my partner for several years now. We are complete opposites in the way we react to/handle things.. I've had anger issues in the past, but I've worked on them and feel like I've been able to think and process things more rationally than I would've in the past. My partner on the other hand is very passive and will avoid confrontation at all costs. I had an issue with a friend of hers that was living with us for a while at the start of "quarantine" because the friend and her bf had been hopping from home to home before coming back to our place and did not want to social distance nor did they respect the space we had separated for them. We had split the apartment in two and there was plenty of space for each person, but the friend still ignored our(my) requests of space. What made it even more uncomfortable was the friend's unhealthy relationship with her bf. It started to trigger my PTSD and got to the point were, instead of blowing up in anger I would ignore her and try to keep quietly to myself by meditating, journaling, or listening to podcasts. Ultimately, the friend kept overstepping, even to the point of making my partner (her best friend) uncomfortable, but my partner said nothing.. and on top of that got mad at me for ignoring her friend because it was hurting her friend's feelings. It has been months now since the friend moved out and this still comes up as an issue because of how I handle it. Recently, while my partner was on a phone call with her mom, I was in a down mood because of some negative world events that had taken place that day and I didn't feel like socializing, so her mother proceeded to shout insults at me for not wanting to listen to her story over the phone and my partner just laughed! I told my partner that her mother's actions weren't okay. I was extremely upset, but I wasn't going to stoop to her mother's level and insult her back. After that video call, my partner and I had a long conversation about her never taking my side or standing up for me. She says it's because of her fear of confrontation, but to laugh at something like that is to encourage the bad behavior. She ended up speaking to her mom about it that same night and her mom texted me some half-assed apology. I was still pretty upset, but decided to just be direct and told her that disrespect was never okay in any relationship and that sometimes I just didn't want to speak to her and that should be okay. She just replied with "okay".. and now 3 weeks later my partner is mad at me because the last half of my message really hurt her mother's feelings.. but she still doesn't think I have a valid reason to be upset about the insults or that my response to her mother was okay. We've been together for years and everything had been great, but now she feels like I'll always have issues with her friends and family and she doesn't want that for the future and obviously neither would I, but she doesn't get how it wasn't okay for her mother to insult me in the first place. I feel like she never tried to see my side of things.. she says she's unable to.. I really feel like it's a lack of trying.. I don't know what to do. I know deep down my partner is a good person, but if she constantly invalidates my feelings, to avoid confrontation, I'll suffer. It would be nice just to hear other's opinions on this.. anything really. Even if you think I was wrong in how I handled things. I know there's always room for improvement.

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