Dear Prudence,
My girlfriend and I have been together for a while now, and we are very much in love. She’s an incredibly supportive person and shows me that she loves me in many ways. But she has recently started yelling at me when I do things that she doesn’t like. Often it’s over mistakes that I’ve made that I would consider small but that cause her a lot of anxiety. She’ll scream at the top of her lungs and will often curse at me as well. It doesn’t help the situation when she yells, and I think it usually makes it worse because I freeze up and continue being unhelpful to her because I can’t really think while being yelled at.
I don’t see yelling as very productive. I don’t really do it, but it’s less of a conscious choice for me. Yelling is just not in my personality. She sees yelling as something necessary in romantic relationships, because for her it indicates passion. Am I being too rigid in thinking that yelling doesn’t have a place in romantic relationships?