A good, successful relationship means solid communication and, on top of that, respect. After all, hearing what someone has to say doesn’t matter if you don’t plan to actually put it into consideration. So when one’s partner has a pretty strict and well-defined boundary, it’s best to actually listen to them.
A woman shared her breakup story, after her boyfriend very directly ignored her wishes regarding not holding newborns. We reached out to the woman who shared the story via private message and will update the article when she gets back to us.
Expecting your partner to follow your boundaries should be a given in a relationship
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So one woman was unpleasantly surprised when her BF had her hold a newborn, despite her saying she didn’t want to
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People with trauma often are aware of what might trigger them
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While it might seem a bit confusing to someone fortunate enough to have never seen it in practice, traumatic triggers are a very real thing. The word “trigger” has absolutely suffered from overuse, but it does perfectly encapsulate how certain stimuli can affect a person’s mental state. The fact that it’s somewhat vague is a feature, not a bug, since the actual trigger can be anything from a newborn to even a specific smell.
It’s also important to note that a person’s response to a trigger might not be identical to someone else’s, nor to “typical” representations. For example, veterans might really have panic attacks during fireworks, for others it might just heighten their distress. Some people report an irrational and powerful drive to leave a place when they encounter a trigger. The variety of responses, unfortunately, are one of the reasons so many people don’t take it seriously, since what one could encounter might not line up with the “picture” of a panic attack someone has built up in their head.
This is all to reinforce why this woman was so adamant about not holding the newborn, she clearly knows her own triggers and wants to prepare to avoid them. The boyfriend, of his own volition, decided that either it wasn’t a big deal or that he was going to “help” her through some ill-conceived “exposure therapy.” In many ways, this mirrors her experience with the wildly irresponsible therapist who contacted her birth mother and is probably why she included this detail.
Secondly, even if this was some scheme to “help her” in his mind, it’s wildly irresponsible and mean-spirited. She made a clear request, he ignored it. More realistically, he probably didn’t take her seriously, but that is also not the act of a kind and caring partner. If someone tells you exactly what they expect and why it’s important to you, it’s your choice to listen or not, but you can’t claim to respect someone if you just ignore them.
Downplaying your partner’s mental issues is a great way to get dumped
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After all, he does play dumb, which is, well, dumb, given that she did tell him. When she is still upset, he calls her crazy, a known remedy for conflict, as well as some other words that she doesn’t specify. Accountability might be hard, but it’s necessary for any relationship to actually last. He didn’t make an honest mistake, he was informed and he chose to just downplay her issues. You should be able to rely on your partner at all times, that includes them knowing what not to do.
Any idea of “exposure therapy” is just insulting at best. He is not her therapist, she did not ask for help, she just established a pretty simple boundary. It only adds fuel to the fire that he made these claims in what is most certainly bad faith, after his strategy of playing dumb didn’t pan out. At the very least, she got to see his true colors before wasting any more time in this relationship.
How someone approaches a partner disrespecting them is a subjective question, but if she feels she’ll resent him then she was right to leave the relationship. Sometimes this sort of distance can be healthy, as she identified the ways their relationship was imperfect. It can be hard to see major issues when you’re still “blinded” by love.