Wise ladies of mumsnet, I need your opinions please, apologies if this is long. Boyfriend and I went for dinner last night with his two brothers and their respective partners (girlfriend and sister in law). I have met brother 1 and girlfriend before and got on great with them, but not brother 2 and sister in law. Him and I have been together for almost six months now. Dinner was hosted at their house, really informal affair.
I didn't really say very much, being in a new environment etc, but towards the end of the evening I get a text from boyfriend (who was sitting right next to me) saying that I was being too negative and that I had to be more positive. I'd just told an anecdote directly related to the conversation about someone that I worked with, and ended up, sort of by accident, talking about some of his more negative characteristics (to give the anecdote more context), but had trailed off a bit awkwardly. I was immediately pretty shocked and embarrassed that a) he thought this, and that b) he would do that whilst I was still sitting around the dinner table in a bloody unfamiliar social situation, thus making me feel incredibly uncomfortable and embarrassed.
Afterwards, when I got home I texted him telling him how upsetting and quite frankly rude I'd found him doing that, at which point he told me that I'd been nothing but negative all night, and that I was 'affecting' everyone at the dinner table, because I had
a) Agreed with brother 1 and girlfriend that working in the service industry was difficult (I used to do the same job as them, and they directly asked me for my opinion). Apparently this meant I was 'going on about how soul destroying their jobs are and bringing them down' when actually I specifically said several positive things to counterbalance the negative stuff I said! His sister in law, who had never done the job, had also joined in and said some negative stuff about it.
b) Agreed with him when he was telling a story about a daft housemate about how silly said housemate was
c) Told this anecdote about workmate, which ended up with me saying he was basically a rubbish person who boasted about doing horrible things like weeing on people in nightclubs. I was just trying to give the story a little more context, but probably failed and went a bit past the mark, I admit. His brother then made a sarcastic comment at my expense. Maybe I was a little negative there, but pretty much everyone around the table had moaned or been negative about someone by that point in the evening, including his brother and sister having a rant about how much they hated their lodger whom none of us had ever met.
d) Made a comment to his sister in law, a vet, about the fact that she probably had to euthanize a lot of animals over the years she'd worked as a vet! This was after his brothers girlfriend had directly pressed her to tell everyone about the most distressing euthanisation she'd had to do, and so I was hardly digging in the knife anymore than anyone else at the table was!
He basically told me that he'd 'had' to 'intervene' and text me because I was being such a Debbie downer and that I'd missed several social queues which should have told me what a misery I was, and how shocked they all were by what I was saying, and that if he hadn't inervened things would have 'only gotten worse' (!) Now, if I was making bloody racist and off colour jokes, or arguing with people, or getting embarrassingly drunk I could understand, but all I (thought) I'd done was contribute to a few conversations, when apparently I was actually this black hole of misery and poor form all night. Consequently, I now feel like absolute shit. Was I out of order? Or was boyfriend just being an arse? There are other issues re. his family and how he makes me feel at the moment that are also getting to me, and at several points on the way to this dinner he had already made me feel pretty shit, and I don't really know what to do about it all.