Everyone knows that relationships are challenging – however, they tend to take significantly more effort when children are involved.
This Redditor has a 12-year-old son and a boyfriend with whom she’s been together for four years. The mom and kid have a little tradition they’ve been practicing for nearly a decade. The two spend a specifically scheduled day together every month but, for whatever odd reason, recently found themselves interrupted by the boyfriend’s antics.
Man sabotages girlfriend’s tradition of having a day out with her 12-year-old son
Image credits: Alper Çuğun (not the actual photo)
Woman snaps at him and tells him that he’s not as “important”
Image credits: Erik Mclean (not the actual photo)
Image credits: throwawyay134
“AITA for being a [jerk] towards my bf after he ruined my day?” – this web user took to one of Reddit’s most judgmental communities, asking its members whether she was wrong to lash out at her boyfriend for spoiling her and her 12-year-old son’s tradition of spending a day out together. The post managed to garner nearly 14K upvotes as well as 2.8K comments discussing the situation.
Relationships are rocky, and although it may sound cliché, communication is the go-to solution to any issue. The couple in today’s story has been a thing for 4 years. The woman has a 12-year-old son from a previous relationship, and the two have created their own tradition that they’ve been practicing since the little one was 5. Each month, the mom and her offspring go out on a specifically scheduled “date,” and it has never been a problem for her boyfriend until recently, when the man, what seems like deliberately, decided to continuously interfere with their plans. Naturally, the youngster wasn’t pumped about the guy’s antics, so upon arriving home he cussed him out and headed straight to his room. The woman backed her son, which eventually led to this whole “I’m important too” conversation that provoked the man to storm out.
To get a more in-depth view of the situation, Bored Panda decided to reach out to a few professionals. Our first expert is Ashley Parker, a relationship therapist based in the beautiful city of York, UK. We briefed Ashley on the situation and invited her to offer some commentary: “I think the difficulty is that jealousy is an uncomfortable feeling, but very normal, and actually being open about those feelings will undoubtedly lessen the sting, but as it perhaps does seem like an abnormal response, the way that his girlfriend responds to this will influence being able to have an open, curious conversation. If she’s accusatory, he will be defensive and vice versa.”
“He may be having a response to this that’s attached to another experience of being excluded in childhood or another relationship. It’s complex, but having a conversation where each person uses ‘I’ statements is important. For example: I am wondering if you’re feeling jealous that I’m going out with my son without you? Do you feel able to share with me how you’re feeling? I wonder what you’re making this mean about you? And about our relationship. It’s important for me to be able to spend time with my son alone so that I can give him my full attention. It’s also important to me that we have that kind of quality time too.”
Lastly, Ashley Parker added: “Having read the post, it would seem that her interpretation is that he intentionally ruined or tried to interrupt the day, and it sounds like her son felt that too. ‘I’m important too’ says to me that he’s vying for her attention/position. If his intention was to disrupt their day, that is intentional; but he may well have done it very unconsciously because of his underlying feelings of exclusion. If his daughter is 20, I would imagine there is less likelihood that he has these kinds of set-out days with her and he could be envying this.”
It leads to a fight, provoking the man to rush out and give the author a dose of the silent treatment
Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)
Our second expert is Sarah Lee, a UK-based psychotherapist who works with adult survivors of childhood trauma and people from dysfunctional and chaotic family backgrounds, to whom we posed similar questions. “It is normal to feel jealous, although we are often told growing up that jealousy is a ‘bad emotion’ or that we shouldn’t feel it. So it’s normal to feel jealous, but it’s not ok to sabotage someone’s day out, call them a b*tch or ignore them.”
“Growing up, we need to learn how to identify our feelings, tolerate them, let them out and communicate them to others. If the boyfriend had better emotional skills, this would look something like: ‘I notice I’m feeling really agitated about your day out with your son. I feel like you drop everything to be with him and I’m not as important. I never felt important growing up as my parents didn’t have time for me so I know it’s a sore spot for me when it happens again.’”
“Notice how in the example above, the boyfriend takes responsibility for his feelings, communicates them in a calm way and uses lots of statements that begin with ‘I’. He also correctly identifies that his response is only partly about now, and that a lot of the emotional pain actually comes from the past. It can be tempting to say things like ‘It’s not my fault I’m cross, you left me out so what do you expect?’ But this escalates the situation, and is likely to result in retaliation and a fight.”
“The problem is that these emotional skills are pretty advanced and anyone who grew up in a family without emotional skills is not going to learn these by themselves. In fact, we often learn unhealthy ways of communicating, like being passive-aggressive, name calling and using the silent treatment as punishment, which is what happened in the original example.”
BP then asked Sarah Lee what one should do if they find themselves in a similar position: “If there is a pattern of sabotage, passive aggressiveness, name calling or silent treatment, then this is abusive and the child and partner should be protected from this. Nobody should have to walk on eggshells around a partner or step-parent, and abuse is often far more subtle than the more easily recognised physical abuse.”
The woman then went online to get some neutral feedback since she thought she might have overreacted
Image credits: JuliaC2006 (not the actual photo)
“The original example is problematic because the boyfriend does a number of things and not just one. He repeatedly tries to manage his own feelings by making other people feel bad and doesn’t want to stop doing this (throwing out the pancake mix, calling twenty times, saying he’d hurt his ankle, not letting them watch the game, calling her a b*tch, ignoring her calls).
“I would be very surprised if this came from nowhere since there are so many examples of problematic behaviour in the example given. It may be that the partner has always been jealous of the mother-son day and tried to ignore his feeling about this (because he didn’t know what to do with them, and feelings were ignored in his family growing up) and he reached a ‘tipping point’ where he now feels entitled to let them all out. This is not an excuse for his bad behaviour, but it can sometimes be helpful for others involved to understand what happened and stop blaming themselves for ‘causing the outburst.’
“If the boyfriend is willing to take responsibility and accept that his behaviour is a problem, then he could learn the emotional skills that he is missing with a therapist. He may not be willing to do this or may prefer to place all the blame on the girlfriend and her son, and when people refuse to acknowledge their part, there is no chance of creating a healthy relationship.
“I would add that in a healthy relationship where everyone takes responsibility for their part in the argument, the son could say ‘I’m sorry I called you a d*ck, I was upset’ or the girlfriend could say ‘I’m sorry I called you a child, that didn’t help’. There’s not much point in doing this in a toxic relationship, however, because in these circumstances one person is normally refusing to take responsibility or change their behaviour, and the other people apologising just reinforces the idea that it’s all someone else’s fault.”
What do you think about this? Would you have done things differently?
Fellow community members shared their thoughts and opinions on the matter
