A honeymoon is meant to be a blissfully beautiful escape from reality. So what would you do if your new spouse decided to put their hands on you during your romantic getaway? Would that be a dealbreaker for you?
This woman has been married to her husband for 10 months, though they have been together for 9 years. Her husband is introverted and has a lot of social anxiety, and she’s the total opposite: a social butterfly.
Overall, they’re pretty much opposites in everything, but opposites attract, as they say. The one thing she and her husband share is a love for traveling, which is actually how they met one another.
Also, she says that she and her husband are soft souls who really crave physical affection, and that has been enough to make them feel happy together despite all of their differences.
“…Our arguments can and have become very toxic over the years, and I’m now unsure if they have escalated to the point where [they] can count as abuse, despite him not being an ‘abuser’ in any way outside of these very specific moments,” she explained.
“Some context to our relationship: He doesn’t control me, or who I see or what I wear, etc. he is generally supportive of my goals, and my friends and family like him. He kisses me every morning before leaving for work.”
“He calls me beautiful and tells me he loves me regularly. He does way more of the house chores, like cooking, because I’m a terrible cook, and laundry, because he prefers to do it himself, despite my offering to help out. He says I will do it wrong.”
She knows she’s behind in the kitchen, as so many adults are capable of cooking, but she feels embarrassed to admit that nobody ever taught her. So this is why things go truly wrong when she’s in charge of making food.
Details aside, let’s get down to those fights that she and her husband get into. She usually yells, and that causes him to shut down. She grew up with parents who screamed at one another and her on a daily basis, and their disagreements didn’t get resolved.
She learned that she had to raise her voice in order to be heard, so that pattern has leaked into how she fights with her husband. Her husband’s mom and dad pretty much never fought when he was a kid, and they did not yell.
She thinks they each have failed to understand how to resolve conflict in a healthy way, since their parents didn’t model that out to them.
So, when she screams at her husband, and he stops engaging or listening to her, that makes her feel terrible as well as triggered due to her childhood. In turn, the argument gets even uglier, and sometimes, her husband physically lashes out.
They have tried to improve their ability to effectively argue over the years, but they can’t afford to go to couples counseling, and their arguments happen months apart, so it’s easy for them to forget about their trouble and slip back into being happily married.
“However on our honeymoon last week, during an argument at nighttime over some lights not working in our hotel room, (essentially I wanted them fixed but he didn’t care and didn’t see the issue and just wanted to relax) he wanted to shut me up, and so he launched forward towards me, grabbed my throat and put his other hand over my mouth while pushing me backwards and telling me to shut up,” she added.
“I immediately backed away and left the room, shouting, ‘What is wrong with you?!’ A few minutes later, he tried to apologize, but I was still too shocked and upset, so we just decided to go to bed.”
“He then spent the rest of the week being apologetic, giving me space, and being more patient with me. But I can’t help but feel like he had ruined our honeymoon, as my mind immediately went to the thought that this shouldn’t be happening, and I questioned if this was a break-up-worthy offense. Hardly the most romantic thoughts to have on your honeymoon!”
The honeymoon scare has her so worried because her husband has escalated in his behavior; if you look at that incident vs. a timeline of past ones.
She acknowledges that she has promised not to scream at her husband, and that’s something she still does, so she’s not blameless.
She does think it’s not fair of her to judge her husband, considering her own list of shortcomings and imperfections. She is very much in love with her husband and finds joy in their marriage aside from their awful arguments, which happen about once a year, so she’s wondering if she should be so upset still about their honeymoon or leave him over it.
I mean, we all learn in kindergarten to keep our hands to ourselves, and putting your hands on your spouse in a way that’s this aggressive is unacceptable.
She could have seriously gotten hurt by her husband putting his hand on her throat like that. It’s irrelevant that they have not worked through how to argue in a healthy way.
I don’t care if she yells, I don’t care what she does, I don’t care how sorry her husband says he is; it is inexcusable for her husband to do what he did.
To me, this is so alarming that she should file for divorce and instantly separate from him, because who knows what he’s capable of if he has no self-restraint?
What do you think?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
