Dear Prudence,
First, I wanted to give a little background on what happened. My husband and I have been together for two years, and before we started dating, he dated a girl for seven years. Within that time, he had become really close with her friends. When we started dating, he was still very close to her group of friends, which is just fine for me. I did very well in befriending them, and I’ve become very close to a lot of them. It was always inevitable that she and I would be in the same place together, and I had no issues with it.
The other night, we had plans to go to one of his friends’ birthday parties, and we knew she would be there. All day, my husband said that if I felt uncomfortable, we would leave immediately. No questions asked. He said that it’s me and him and that’s all that matters. I really appreciated his approach because I truly don’t do well in awkward situations as it is.
Well, we are there for about 2.5 hours. She’s been there as well and it was getting progressively more awkward because all of the people gravitated towards her, and it was just my husband and me standing near each other. After a while, I told him I felt uncomfortable and I was ready to go home. At which point he said that I “half-assed” this, that I should just “get it over with” and say “hi” to her, that he thought that I would be the bigger person, that he thought I would be stronger in this situation, that if we left it would look like she “won” … and then got visibly angry with me because I wanted to leave.
Eventually he storms out, and we walk to the car. I’ve begun crying and started defending myself saying that made me feel safe by giving me an out if I felt uncomfortable. He then yelled at me really loudly and got out of the car and slammed the door. He went back to the party without me while I drove home.
I have yet to hear an apology from him. What upsets me the most is that he’s told me that the opinions of those friends matter a lot to him. And it’s important to him for them to see us in a good light. He chose their opinions over how I felt in that moment. Keep in mind that we have nothing to prove with these friends, we have been around them for years, they were all at our wedding. The drama was only because his ex was there. He told me that if I went up and said “hi” to her, it would make things less awkward for the whole group. And it was my job to do that for everyone else. He obviously went back to the party and told people what had just happened because people started texting me asking if I was okay and asked what was going on.
Since talking to him, he has only gotten angry with me because I raised my voice and was angry at him while in the car … all while defending myself because my husband just made me feel so terrible and inferior to this group of people.
Please help. All I feel is resentment and anger towards my husband. Obviously I love him very much. But this is not how I imagined my husband treating me at all.
— Disrespected