Moody DH is like a teenager

[RoseRose217]

Hi, this is my first post on here just looking to get some opinions fro others as I'm not sure that I trust my judgement and I don't want to talk to friends about this.

My DP and I have been together around 2 years and live together. He has always been a little huffy and he says his dad is like this also but much much worse. I have noticed his dad be a little huffy at times but nothing too bad, although perhaps he is on his best behaviour around me

Neither of us are perfect and we get into a fair few arguments but most of the time we are generally happy, we want the same things and are a pretty good match for each other. We both love each other very much.

One of my DPs shortcomings is his temper and his moods. He gets frustrated and angry very easily. I am not used to seeing a man react like this, and it makes me scared, which he says is silly. E.g. Today he was watching TV and drinking tea on the sofa, while holding the remote. He spilt his (warm, not hot) tea on himself and the sofa. Most people would be annoyed with themselves for this but these things happen. He exclaimed a profanity and then slammed the TV remote down on to a glass coaster very loudly, I'm surprised it didn't shatter into a thousand pieces. This then put him in a bad mood for perhaps 45 mins. If i try to speak to him in this time I get met with sarcasm, generally huffiness and unhappiness.

In this example he is annoyed st himself rather than me, but I find the outburst scary and out of proportion. The sulkiness afterwards also seems extreme.

We don't have kids now but i worry that when they come along and accidents and spills happen more often that he will be a nightmare.

Other times it is more directed at me. If I ask him something when he is busy or tired or ill or has a sniffle, I get a moody sarcastic response that reminds me of the teenagers from Kevin and Perry. Tonight he was snoring so I went to sleep in the guest room, he woke up 5 mins later and sent me a text asking why I had left our bedroom, I went through and calmly said it was because he was snoring (he has a cold just now). Usually he argues with me and says he doesn't snore or that he hasn't been asleep yet and that I'm making it up, so I recorded a sound clip on my phone to play him in case he didnt believe me. I said to him calmly the snoring was very loud and that I recorded it in case he didn't believe me. He got extremely huffy, jumped out of bed, exhaled in a huffy teenage way, shouted something like 'for f*ks sake!', stomped to the spare room and angrily told me he would be sleeping in the spare room. I got annoyed and asked him to go back to bed, he wouldn't, so I snapped (I've had a whole day of his bad mood because he is tired and has a cold, these are just 2 examples out of about 10 huffy incidents today) and told him to 'pss off back to bed'. He then went back to bed.

I'm now in the spare room and wide awake

I should add that when he is not acting like a teenager he is very loving and would do anything for me - makes cuppas on demand, will drive to the shops to get me anything, cooks me breakfast, when I was ill last week he took time off work to drive me to docs and look after me (e.g. Cups of tea in bed). However I can never be sure when 'the teenager' will emerge, sometimes it's once a week, but on bad days like today it is about 10 times a day.

I'm just looking to get some input from others - anyone else got a DH like this? How do you cope with the moods? Any advice would be very appreciated.

Also am I being unreasonable to expect him to address and try to improve this behaviour? Should I just accept that it is who he is?

Don't have children with him. He will be a terrifying father.

OP, run. Honestly, it only ever gets worse.

His father is like this, he is like this. What do you think his son or daughter will be like?

Don't marry him, and definitely don't have kids with him. He sounds like a total fuckwit.

Run.

Two years in, no children. I'd think about calling this relationship to a halt now.

It's worrying.

You can't change this, only he can (if he cares to- which he doesn't)

Sounds like you are living with a rude and bad mannered teenager - what do you get from this relationship?

Does he do this in public or at work? If he doesn't then he has full control and only does it when he feels like doing it.
It's a horrible trait and I would cut my losses and walk away. I wouldn't want to have my children exposed to this at home where it is supposed to be a safe place.

Leave it never gets any better.
You will spend your days walking on eggshells.
He will do things like say the night before he will get up with the kids then when they actually wake up at stupid o clock he will huff and puff, slam things in the kitchen about so you end lying there feeling bad.
If you get a cold the same time as him he will see this as a major issue.
I could go on it's just not worth it and won't improve.

I had a boyfriend like this and he added emotional abuse into the mix once he established that I would accept the tantrums that weren't directed at me. Of course there were good bits, I wouldn't have stayed if it was bad all the time but it was bad enough to keep me on edge even through the good bits.

You can do better.

IME it CAN get better - people mature, develop. Difficult to know whether this will happen but if the pluses outweigh the minuses, then worth at least seeing if you can find a way to address this with him without him reacting defensively.

How about " you seem very unhappy when things go wrong for you. I know you find it frustrating and blame yourself but you are a good person [evidenced by his "good" behaviour when caring for you OP] I love you and want to help if I can" as a conversation opener?

For all those PP only interested in having a relationship with someone who is already perfect, good luck with that! None of us are.

This is hugely red flag behaviour.

I would bet anything that he has NEVER behaved like this at work. Because he knows what the consequences of such inappropriate behaviour would be.

He does this because he believes he's entitled to take out his frustration and anger on you.

Good men do not behave this way. They don't have tantrums and sulk. Bringing children into this relationship will just expose them to his emotionally abusive behaviour. You need to walk away and never look back.

My exh was like this. He also used to say that his father was like that and he was less so, this is not justification of a bad temper. I once told him that if I ever left him it would be because of his temper. Years later I did leave him.

There are tons of examples of how this impacted on the whole family. One morning he was opening a tin of tuna to make sandwiches for a picnic we were going on with the kids. Some of it spilt on his -not-very-nice- top. His usual slamming, shouting, throwing tantrum started, I said 'hey, don't let it spoil your day, I will get you a clean top'. He grabbed the car keys and stormed out of the house and was gone for hours, spoilt the kids day.

We have been divorced 10 years now. DS (20) tells me that he remembers the tight feeling in his tummy of realising his Dad was in a bad mood, he felt continually frightened around him, even though he never hurt him.

If you want to continue in this relationship and have kids with him, he needs help to change his behaviour.

The op says I think of friends were over he may have managed to slightly scale it back a little but he would have still had the same basic reaction. I don't believe he is acting like this just because I am there if you see what I mean. I find it very embarrassing when other people see this behaviour

I think that implies he does it regardless of who is present. (just like my father and FIL)

I couldn't live like this OP. I grew up with a father with a terrible temper and i was constantly walking on eggshells as was my mum. And if i did something trivial as well as Dad getting furious, Mum would then blame me for putting him in a mood. She became so conditioned not to upset him that she blamed everyone else too.

It's a form of bullying. It keeps you unsure and trying to constantly head off any minor thing that might set him off. You can never predict it tho. I remember waiting anxiously for dad to come home and tidying up the way i thought he would like it and when i saw him walk past the window or heard the key in the door i would feel completely on the edge of my seat. Some days it would be fine and i would breath a sigh of relief. But other days he would kick off about how i hadn't done something right. There is no rhyme or reason with him either as you then do it the same the next day and its still not right as that was YESTERDAY!

DH's dad didn't have a temper but was a sulker apparently and would ignore dh and mil for months over the most trivial things. In fact they stopped going on holiday and eventually out of the house at all, because someone just bumping his seat, or an order not being right, or a queue or something would put him in a mood for weeks. Sadly mil also pandered to it and stopped even going to the drs (hard to park, might have to wait, weeks of moaning etc). She put off symptoms for so long that even when she was in tremendous pain and couldn't move they didn't call an ambulance because it would annoy fil (where would it park etc). They wouldn't get a taxi for same trivial annoyances. So poor mil was in agony for days till they eventually did take her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Had she have gone to the drs earlier they could have caught it earlier. But no one wanted to upset fil.

I would say so fucking what? if he says his dad is worse. What kind of piss poor excuse is that? Yes we can always find someone who behaves worse, but is that where we want the barometer of our behaviour to be?

My mother is like this.. huffing and puffing and speaking in a horrible tone of voice over seemingly minor things. Very passive agressive. If I pull her up on it she'll deny she's doing it. I'm never comfortable in her presence so we have a very strained relationship.

Jesus, that sounds terrifying. Do not bring babies into this mix. If he can react like that over minor things like tea spills he will not deal well with the sleep deprivation and endless frustration babies bring.

My father was like this. My entire childhood was spent dreading what kind of mood he would be in. My mother was very loyal but I remember her saying "never marry a moody man".

My dad was like this when I was growing up. No-one ever knew when he was going to blow his top about the slightest thing. As kids tend to internalise such things, me and my siblings grew up feeling responsible for his anger and outbursts - daddy is cross, he's shouting at me, I must be bad - and every one of us has suffered from self esteem issues and/or mental health issues as a result. Mum spent her life trying to act as a buffer, but wasn't really able to protect us from the impact of living in such an unpredictable environment. As a result she has a really poor relationship with a couple of her children. Emotional abuse (and that's what this is) has devastating effects on families. Don't have children with this man until he has learned to accept and manage his anger. If he refuses to get professional help with his anger, get yourself out of there and don't look back.

I have a dad like this.

I love my dad with all my heart but seeing what the relationship has done to my mum...She's a shadow of what she could have been. She has a pathological urge to be liked and to always put herself out and never first. I hate the way she's treated by my dad but nothing I can do will make her leave him. She did when I was young but always came back.

Great for me, bad for her. Now their relationship is dependent on her being a martyr and him going off on one. It's a pretty toxic sick little cycle they are both in.

It has affected my sisters and I too in different ways which took a lot of counselling to get around.

Either he needs to change, which is very unlikely, you need to leave or you'll end up like my mum.

I love my parents. I hate how their relationship is and I've wrestled between loving them and feeling so angry and irritated by them. I refuse to talk to either about it now and if I know it's a shit time for them I stay away. Which makes me feel awful. A counsellor once told me their relationship was emotionally abusive to each other and to us children which I find had to swallow sometimes because we had some really great times but at other times I do wonder...Was it?

Wow, thanks for all the replies!

@costacoffeeplease - yes he thinks this is normal and he thinks I'm the abnormal one who grew up in an abnormal household because I didn't see men acting like this. I should also add that he is not from the UK and I gather than in his country they aren't as reserved as we are in the UK so that might have a part to play in it. Perhaps it is more normal in his culture. He is not remorseful and says that he thinks I'm being silly by getting scared/anxious by this behaviour. He genuinely believes this. So far he has shown no interest in changing.

@echt and @squinkiesrule - I'm not sure what he is like with others if I'm not there, since I can't see that first person. But from his stories that he tells me about work it sounds like he is the same there too. However for some reason it seems to work out ok for him and even his boss panders to him. He mentions his boss tries hard to 'keep him happy'.

@cheddargorgeous - He doesn't think his reactions are extreme. He says it is normal, his dad was worse than this growing up as was his grandad, and that his friend's dads were the same too. He is not from the UK, so perhaps it is a cultural difference.

@HerOtherHalf - He always snores if he has a cold or is super tired. However he snores other times too. I would say 1 day a week I need to go sleep in the guest room. I have tried waking him up but he gets annoyed and claims I am making it up, so it's easier to leave and go sleep in another room. He gets very, very annoyed by this. This morning when I came back through he said he doesn't want a relationship like this where we sleep in different rooms, and he thinks that I don't have enough tolerance for his snoring and that it is not that bad, and that I should just tune it out and go to sleep. I explained it is too loud and goes on for too long to do this, and played him the recording. He has already been to the docs about it before, and seen an ENT specialist who could find nothing wrong with his nose. He has gained weight, especially around his neck, so I think this is what is causing the snoring. This morning he said he didn't see what else he could do as he has been to the doc so I should just accept the snoring and learn to go to sleep with it since he doesn't want me sleeping in another room. I said well if he really wanted to know how he could improve it he could try losing weight. He stomped off in a huff to have a shower and has now gone for a walk to 'clear his head' as he says I'm just impossible .

He seems to genuinely believe I should be able to sleep next to the very loud rattley snoring. I've explained it's not my fault but he says it is about tolerance, that it's not that bad and I should put up with it.

When he said he was going for a walk I said good and that the last 3 days have been very hard for me too as he is behaving like a teenager. He said that he is not, and that I am. This is his technique I think, to refuse to admit any fault and to try to convince me that the problems are mine.

Don't have children with this man

You have been warned. You are not going to listen though, are you ?

You are under the impression that if you can just find the right words to explain how it bothers you then he will stop

My father hasn't stopped in over 70 years.

Don't have children with this man

It doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong here 9although he's wrong, obviously). The thing is, is it worth putting up with and is it how you want to live?

2 years is nothing. It's a tiny amount of time. Don't sleepwalk into a long relationship with a man like this, because believe me decades can pass and you're right there where you began (seen it, so many times)

He thinks this is normal behaviour with loved ones. Presumably his father shouted and huffed at him growing up. That is how he thinks families communicate and how he would treat his children and wife. Before settling down with anyone consider how they communicate with their family and what the norm is for them.

He won't change. He doesn't even see it as a problem. He wants you to put up with it.

So. You have a clear decision. You know what he is like, and what he will be like for the next 60(?) years. Do you want that for you? Do you want it for any potential children?