Hi! Thanks for the kind welcome.
I have a few recent examples. This post is really long but there never seems a way to recount this stuff succinctly.
Most of this first bit a copy/paste from another post of mine, happened a couple weeks ago:
I came home from work and he was in the bathroom. He can be there for a half hour or so. I have watched an entire episode of one of my shows while he's in there. So I relax on the couch and put on an episode of my show. Never did he come over and ask if we could put something else on, no, he went in the bedroom instead. I thought he just wanted some alone time or had a headache or whatever. It wasn't until I was getting ready for bed when he called me an a##hole and accused me of seeing he was in the bathroom and thinking 'oh, I'll just put my show on so then he can't watch his show'. Like it was a pre-mediated siege of the TV. He'll say these types of paranoid things like other people are out to get him. Not in horrible ways like people want to do him physical harm, but low-key ways like people in general are out to mess with him.
My response was to basically say: so what you are telling me is that according to you, I had malicious intent to monopolize the TV by putting my show on so you couldn't watch a show you wanted to watch. Of course he didn't say 'yes' but that is exactly what he was saying. I told him that if he wanted to watch something else he should have said so, but he never asked and I'm not a mind reader. I have had to tell him a lot lately that I'm not a mind reader because it's like he has a script in his head that I'm supposed to follow and when I don't, he gets mad at me. That was part of a 1.5 hour 'conversation' that he initiated by calling me an a##hole and then having the same argument over and over as each time I tried to wrap it up he would complain about it again.
Fast forward to today. My husband and I are in the kitchen getting dinner ready. I noticed a box of muffins on the counter that had been there since Saturday. There was one muffin left. I asked if anyone was going to eat that muffin or if I should throw it out. My son (20) picked up the box and went to open it.
I said to my son "hold up now, ask husband if you can have that" as I wasn't sure if my husband had dibs on it but was doing that thing where he is doesn't speak up for himself proactively (he tends be reactive). My son asked him if it was OK if he had it and instead of just saying 'yes' or 'no', my husband goes "why didn't you want that the other day when I offered it to you?" It's like OMG just answer the damn question. So my son says he didn't want it the other day, and my husband again asks him why he didn't eat it before. My son then puts it back on the counter, he wasn't interested anymore.
That ticked my husband off and when he and I sat down for dinner (my son ate earlier so he was in his room at this time), my husband starts complaining about my son and all the annoying things he does and how it's all my fault and when I interjected -- probably trying to JADE -- he told me not to interrupt him.
He talks in a monotone and at the same pace with one sentence bleeding into the next, as if the pauses of punctuation don't exist, so it's either interrupt him or let him talk because he doesn't pause or often ask me a question to give me the ability to reply. Personally, I don't care if I'm interrupted, to me, conversations are organic and can get lively and if interrupting me will cut to the chase so I don't have to waste my breath, then good. But he hates being interrupted. It's like he has a bunch of talking points in his head and if he can't proceed through them, it's almost painful to him. Exasperated, I just let him talk.
He then basically kitchen sinked me for 55 minutes bringing up a whole litany of stuff from over the past several years. During all of that I was thinking "I need to set a boundary for this as surely I shouldn't have to be held hostage like this". I tried to pay attention the whole time but seriously, I cannot focus continuously for that long especially after a long day at work and a stressful evening giving my first speech at an event. (Note: as expected, he did not ask me how it went when I got home, normal social cues are lost on him).
So I decided that when he was done to let him know that when he monologues like that, I'm not going to reply to the "so, what do you have to say for yourself" question he typically asks after a long rant. So when he finally stopped and asked "so, what do you have to say for yourself?" I told him that I wasn't responding to what was a monopolization of the conversation. I said he should stick to one topic at a time so we can hash out that topic and then move on to the next.
Then he said 'just pick one thing that I said and respond to that', but I said no. That I was setting a boundary and since he turned a two-way conversation into a one-person monologue that the conversation ended when his monologue began.
As expected, he got offended and angry, and threatened to leave but in a round-about way, not actually saying he was going to leave but more like 'maybe you should get your own car' (we share a car and part of his gripe was that I don't take it in for service or fill up the gas tank -- he drives it to work every day and on average I drive it once a week) and 'you never need me for anything, you're practically living like you are single anyway (okay true, but it's easier to just do it myself than ask him for help just to get grilled on why, or told 'no, it won't work' -- he has a can't-do attitude -- or have him criticize me, or have him get frustrated by stuff that isn't typically frustrating -- he's like that "has this ever happened to you?" person in the As Seen on TV commercials where you're like uh, no actually because I pay attention to what I'm doing -- or complain the whole time and afterward that his back hurts -- which is legitimate as he does have disk issues so I take care of all the heavy lifting grunt work). But he's done these veiled threats of divorce before, that's his go-to when the conversation doesn't go his way.
He nuked up his dinner as it had gotten cold (I ate mine while he monologued), I got up and cleaned the kitchen and when I was done, he was in bed. Tomorrow it'll likely either be the silent treatment or he'll act like nothing happened.
