I too wonder if it actually broke or whether he just wanted to get rid of it, because it didn’t have any memories for him, and that was just an excuse. Even if it did, the fact that he remembered which (wrong) bin he put it in is proof that, when he watched you search for it, he was hoping that you’d shrug, just give up and forget about it. When you didn’t, he sought to minimise your feelings by saying “Oh, it broke, so I had to throw it away”. It was all about him and you don't matter.
I’m your husband in this situation. I have zero attachment to material possessions and despite being alive 40 years I am constantly surprised how much people become attached to things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve got into trouble for doing stuff like this in my life. My mind wouldn’t understand why a broken pot would do anything other than go straight in the bin. People get so angry with me if I ever jeopardise their material possessions.
That’s because it isn’t up to you to make decisions about other people’s things and it sounds like you seriously struggle to respect boundaries.
To those saying you don’t need the item to help you with your memories, do they feel the same about old photos? Your long-gone Mum and Dad’s wedding photos from long before digital and online backups, but you’d just chuck them in the bin because “you remember what they looked like, so you don’t need a tatty old piece of paper”?
I’ve not spoken to him properly for 2 days now.
Lovely. Sulking and silent treatment.
It's only a pot.
It’s not healthy to build such a connection with an item that belonged to a loved one.
Not having the pot doesn’t change your memories.
Cooking in the pot doesn’t keep her with you.
Not talking to someone for 2 days is awful, it’s abusive. Stop it.
Move on, you’ll be so much happier when you do.
She isn’t doing it to punish him, it’s because she’s so dreadfully upset. You don’t get to control somebody else’s emotions or to say how they should feel or what they should or shouldn’t personally value. What IS abusive is to throw away something that you know somebody else treasures and then to gaslight them by leaving them searching for it whilst you pretend to have no knowledge.
Even if it did really break, his response should have been to sincerely apologise for what couldn’t be changed and then ask how she wants to move on – does she want to try and repair it, keep the bits somewhere safe for the memories, even though it can’t be used so easily any more (not that a pot is automatically useless without a handle) or does SHE want to throw it away - now or when she is ready to let go.
I'd be angry too, but, being sensible about it, he broke an item which had no sentimental connection to him and threw it away.
How many times do we read about women whose partners wear tatty old sweaters that they can't wait to sling in the bin when their partner isn't looking?
He had no connection to the pot. He should have asked you, and he should have known, but I'd guess, in the moment, it was just a broken pot to him.
He knew that it meant a lot to her and that it didn’t belong to him. He did have a connection to the pot: it was a treasured heirloom of his wife’s. Loving spouses will accept that, even if they don’t care about something, it might be very precious to their spouse – so they respect that imputed value, even though they don’t personally share it. It becomes precious to you by virtue of the fact that it is precious to somebody who is precious to you. The women who arbitrarily bin their husbands’ tatty old clothes when he is out are very wrong too. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
It reminds me of the post on here a couple of years ago from the woman whose husband got rid of her much loved collection of children's books. There are a few posts that stand out to me and that was one of them. She sounded so lovely too.
I also remember a very sad one where a woman’s nasty, hateful MIL gaslighted her by claiming that she’d “just thrown away a huge pile of generic old clutter that was unsightly, lying about and dangerously in the way” after 'checking up on the house unasked' whilst they were on holiday (bad enough: not her call), when she’d actually gone rummaging in her DIL’s wardrobe, found a shoebox containing clearly precious old photos and memories and deliberately binned them. The bin men had been before they returned. Curiously enough, she hadn’t ‘fallen over’ any of her own son’s precious things that ‘needed’ to be binned.
The ‘stuff’ is, if anything, almost a distraction: it’s mainly about respecting other people’s feelings and boundaries. The world would be a much nicer place if everybody could accept that people are different and that that doesn’t automatically make them wrong and you right, just because you don’t always share the same interests, beliefs or priorities.