Ugh. Today’s been rough.
I’m struggling with how to properly communicate “no, that wasn’t appropriate behavior” in a way that actually is received that way. In every way I’ve attempted, it gets argued and turned around; the net result indicating that the message wasn’t received.
Everything from “you don’t care about me the way I want so why should I care about you the way you want”, “you don’t respect me so why should I respect you”, to “ok, so what, you’ll be fine, what more needs to be talked about”, to straight up arguing that she was listening to me, despite the fact that objectively she couldn’t recall what I said, to just straight up pulling in outside arguments in to “prove” that her behavior wasn’t inappropriate.
I don’t know a diplomatic way to get things across that “you know what, you did something wrong”, when there’s no sign of self-awareness of how inappropriate her behavior was, and her defensive strategy is to reverse the situation into either “I did nothing wrong, you were the one who…” and/or “ok, but this other time, you…”.
Something like “how about you act more mature about this”, or “maybe you should act like an adult”, or the reverse “stop being so childish”, is just going to degrade things. But how do you request (or for that matter, teach) someone to behave more maturely? A part of it seems she was just never taught some of these things.
I did say “your behavior right now is undermining the stability of our relationship”.
It seems like just about anything else I could say or do is either going to keep her at this primitive childish level of arguing, or it’s going to build resentment and fodder for future arguments.
I really don’t think I should have to be dealing with this, but given that I am, I don’t know what actions I can take to improve things in the future.
Today I had a project cancelled, and the net result is a pretty major change to my job responsibilities. I go from being highly competent in something very familiar, to being highly incompetent in something unfamiliar. While my boss/coworkers have faith in things, it’s still going to be very uncomfortable for quite awhile. From a resume standpoint, it looks like “oh, hey, you have nearly 20 years of experience in this technology… why did you completely abandon it?”
The behavior I’d expect from my girlfriend is something along the lines of interest and concern “how is this going to affect things? will you still be working with the same people?” and so on, showing some degree of understanding, empathy, and really just wanting to understand the impact of it.
The reaction I actually got was her reading a book (not even a hello), then, while I ate lunch, her playing on her computer. Then, her wanting to go look at cabinetry and get donuts. So I cut the workday short so we could go do that. When we were in the car, I started telling her about what happened, while she was playing on her phone. I asked her why she wasn’t listening, and she argued that she was listening. I told her this is actually pretty important, and I wanted her to at least pay attention while I’m telling her about it. She claimed she was listening to everything I said. I asked what I said. She remembered a couple things, but not the important things. I told her that. She argued that point in at least 3 different ways (1. I can pay attention to you while I’m on my phone, 2. I probably wouldn’t have remembered anything even if I wasn’t on the phone, 3. what does it matter anyway? you didn’t lose your job, so what)
And it just went downhill from there. There wasn’t even a “that sucks”.
I just don’t even know how to get through to her when she starts acting like a spoiled teenage girl. 99% of the time she’s not like that, but the last couple times some really significant stuff happened in my life, she was.
