This has gathered rather more comments than I ever expected, and I appreciate being able to let off steam. However, I was angry when I posted the OP so I don't really want it being taken as the sum total of our relationship, but I also realize it's all you've got to go on. So perhaps I should clear up a few things (or add fuel to the fires, who knows).
Punishing DP - I don't actually do this. It's just tempting sometimes. And talking about it is certainly cathartic.
Husband - we're not married. Been together nearly a decade, not actually married.
Knitting in public - I really don't see a problem with this, and am kind of surprised that others do. I knit the entire shawl in the presence of DP, cat, relatives, strangers on bus, etc with no ill effects. I wouldn't knit at all if I had to do it alone - no time!
Hiding All The Precious Things - my DP is an adult, and can do things like boil a kettle, drive a car, hold a baby safely so I don't really think I should need to hide every single thing I don't want broken. It's also not terribly practical - at least not for things one uses, and my preciousssss breakable things are things I have to use (or at least see) to enjoy. And if I'm not enjoying them, what's the point of having them?
You Should Have Known... - Again, I don't really see how. I'm not saying it was shark-attack-while-being-struck-by-lightning unlikely, but the combination of circumstances was unlikely (which is why I call it an accident, although I do believe DP cocked up as well) and (believe it or not) I had controlled for the major hazards.
And for the curious, here's a blow-by-blow account, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I admit. Also very long.
Picture the scene: a woman, 30ish, scruffy, opens the door to a cluttered bedroom. The two single beds have been stripped, pushed together and covered with towels. A lace shawl (a differrent lace shawl) is blocking: stretched to its full size and pinned out with a whole lot of steel dressmakers pins it looks more like a dead butterfly or a torture device than something to wear.
The woman approaches the bed and pats the shawl. "Oh, my preciousssss, you're dry. At last!" she cackles, "now all the guests have left and the last of the Christmas knitting is done, I can finally block -- my shawl!" She produces a crumpled bundle of yarn and flourishes it triumphantly. "For me, yessssss, all for me, my precioussssss, made of precioussssssssss yarn. Which I may have spent more than I should on. But! So what? Soon it will be beautiful." An observer at this moment might have doubted her sanity: the knitting (if knitting it is) looks like tangled string, or a particularly large clump of wet hair, if hair came out of the shower drain in that unlikely shade of blue.
Setting the hairball to one side, she pulls the pins out of the dead butterfly, folds it and sets it on top of a bookcase. Returning to work, she adjusts the towels and spreads the bundle of wet hair out on the bed. Now its spread out, it does look more pleasant - and is also clearly too long for the bed. The woman mutters to herself as she finds a sensible way to pin the thing out. Eventually she settles and starts sticking pins in the picot edging.
After about 40 pins, she realizes that she'll have to pin every single picot to get it to block properly, putting a pin in at centimeter intervals for roughly 4-6 meters of edging, and she despairs slightly. However! Help is at hand. She goes to the door.
"Darling?" she croons in her sweetest tones. "Could you help me with something?" A man appears at the door, 30ish, less scruffy.
"Is it a knitting thing?" he asks.
"Why yes, my sweet," she trills. "Could you possibly help me stick a few hundred pins into a towel?"
"And then we can watch Die Hard 2?"
"Of course, my hero, light of my life and helper of the pin-weary."
"Deal."
The couple return to the bed and begin sticking pins into the bed. At this point, the cat of the house decides this is a good time to come out of hiding. She's not supposed to be in here, but she sees a chance to waft her tail under the man's nose. He is what the humans call 'allergic' and she calls 'hilarious' so it's worth giving up her nest for.
The humans are working fairly intently, so it's only when she's sitting on the corner of a towel, reaching a paw out to poke the pins that they spot her.
"Cat!" the humans say together. The female human, who has known the cat for over a decade, says "No! Bad cat!" and moves slowly towards her. The male human who has only lived with the cat for a couple of months* but has already witnessed the destructive power of her claws dives for her and drags her towards him. The cat, surprised and enraged by this cavalier treatment digs her claws into whatever she can reach, pulling the towel, lace shawl, pins and all with her.
The woman shouts "No!" and puts her hands out, uselessly. The cat struggles free and hides under the bed. The man looks at the tangled heap of towels.
"I was just trying to help," he says
"I don't think, strictly speaking, that was an improvement," replies the woman as she gently untangles the mess. As she puts the towels back into place, she notices claw marks in the fabric. "Oh well, old towel, that's fine," she says, smoothing the first corner back out, she puts the pins back, until ---
oh no!
can it be!
say it ain't so!
a hole she did not knit!
a dropped stitch!
She stoops closer. Here and here and here - a cat claw has neatly severed a few key strands, and her work is unraveling before her eyes. She quickly secures it with a forest of pins, then rests her head on the edge of the bed.
"Is it alright?" asks the man.
"No. It's really, really not," she replies.
She studies it again while he-- actually, I have no idea what he did at this point.
"Can you fix it?" he asks.
"I don't think so," she says. She flops onto the floor like a cat who doesn't want to be picked up. "For technical reasons, it can't be fixed because technical the technical. I'm going to have to undo it. It's probably 25 hours work to fix it." She stares at the ceiling, wanting to scream. She would usually yell, but this seems at once too serious and not serious enough. After all, no one died.
He looks at her. "It was an accident. I was trying to help."
She lies there some more.
"I'm sorry," he says. "It was an accident."
She hears a voice calling her and gets off the floor.
"Get the cat out of the room and shut the door," she hisses. "I'll deal with this later."
~CURTAIN~
*We have moved in with the cat (and my mother) temporarily for various reasons probably not relevant.