Shitty comment or am I being pathetic

[N022330]

Hey
Ive been seeing a guy for around 9-10 weeks.
He’s lovely and good with the kids. But sometimes says things I don’t think he realises is a bit shitty. There’s been 2 or 3 occasions he’s said something and I felt offended by it.
I’m just going to use tonight as an example.
i have 3 children and have stretch marks on my tummy and I am quite self conscious about it, he knows this.
tonight we were watching a film and we were talking about a woman on it and I said well she definitely doesn’t have a tummy like me . And we both laughed and he agreed and said yeah if you had a tummy like that you wouldn’t be with me you’d be with someone better.

I dont know why exactly but I instantly felt like I had been stabbed in the tummy and made me feel like shit.

what do you all think of this am I being over sensitive xx

So you’ve been replying and now you’ve been asked what else he says you’re “going to leave it there” ok....

no I wrote the post and posted it and then saw your comment…..people are so judgmental jeez

Op, why did you even make the original remark about your stretch marks if you perhaps knew there was a small chance it could backfire and you could gain a response you didn't like. You're the one who mentioned it first and by all accounts sounds like it's not the first time you have mentioned it. Moral of the story and all that.

The fact that his comment upset you, that you need to know if you are being "over sensitive" and your refusal to accept that you may have made a mistake here is all pointing to the fact you are carrying a lot of emotional baggage from your abusive marriage.

I am not sure that you are ready for a new relationship yet, and that some counselling to help you come to terms with the issues your marriage has left you with would be helpful. When my abusive marriage ended all I felt was relief and I thought I was ok. It took a couple of years for the real effects to hit me and for me to accept that I wasnt as "fine" as I thought I was. I am getting there now, another 2 years down the line but I think that I will probably always have some things in the back of my mind.

And FWIW I do not think that there is such a thing as being "over" sensitive. We are all sensitive to different things and for different reasons, all we can do is explain that to those closest to us and hope that they love us enough to be understanding and not use those feelings against us. However asking loaded questions when the answer may trigger that sensitivity for you is rather like poking yourself in the eye with a stick and then complaining when it hurts.

How do you ‘read’ someone correctly? I have a friend who is a child protection social worker. One of her colleagues who worked in a children’s home, was convicted of having child sex abuse images. None of the child protection professionals he worked with had a clue he had a sexual interest in children. It is utterly naive to think that you can somehow ‘tell’ if someone e is a paedophile. It is naive in the extreme to think that you are ‘discrediting’ someone if you think they can’t accurately identify a paedophile. No-One can! If they were identifiable no-one would let them bear their kids!

And I never said that. If you want to criticize posters who said that I suggest you quote their posts to do so.

please perform basic safeguarding and ask yourself how your choices benefit and prioritise your kids. Bringing some random bloke you’ve known for a few weeks into their home is not in their best interests. It’s shocking that you’ve done this.

Just because the time was right for you doesn't mean it was right for your kids.

And quite aside from that if you've having to question the things he says after 9 weeks then it doesn't look great, does it.

you're not you've daft phone.

OP, please ignore the herd. You were not being over sensitive. It was a shit comment from him. Please do not let that stupid comment (or posters on here) make you feel bad about yourself.

What I have learnt from this thread however is quite enlightning:
Never mention anything about your body to anyone you are intimate with unless you want to be a) seen as fishing for compliments, b) must be insecure so don't be in a relationship, c) fuck knows what c is, but apparently don't be in a relationship if you're insecure about any aspect of your body. (so thats nearly all women then).

Never let a new potential life partner see, hear or know about your dc until you have been seeing them at least 3 years, have had them fully vetted and the dc are over 18. Anything less makes you a bad mother, because you know, how on earth can you decide for yourself what the best thing to do is for the dc you have been successfully raising for x number of years. Anonymous idiots on the internet are much more qualified to judge that situation.

Never let a new potential life partner see, hear or know about your dc until you have been seeing them at least 3 years, have had them fully vetted and the dc are over 18. Anything less makes you a bad mother, because you know, how on earth can you decide for yourself what the best thing to do is for the dc you have been successfully raising for x number of years. Anonymous idiots on the internet are much more qualified to judge that situation

What I've learnt is that despite campaigns to raise awareness of child sex abuse since the 1980s, despite the fact that is well-known the that no-one can spot a sexual predator and that its always the person you least expect, there are apparently a lot of women who still think that simply by being a good mother you somehow have a magical intuition about who is a paedophile ( I guess all those kids who were abused by their mother's partners must have had mums who were NOT being successfully raising their kids prior to meeting that man then ). And that prioritising the feelings of mums is much more important that highlighting well-evidenced facts and risks, and that anyone apparently deprioritising feelings of mothers to raise safeguarding issues needs to be stigmatised as an 'idiot' presumably to discourage others from raising safeguarding in future with their pesky facts about men with a sexual interest in children.

Well there’s mentioning it once and then there’s going on and on about it at every opportunity, I mean I really don’t get why op made the comment, seems like any chance to bring it up and that gets tiring, it doesn’t sound like it was the first time either and she said he’s made several comments so makes you wonder how much she brings it up.

@benevernomore but by the logic of "you just don't know so NO!" I shouldn't leave DH alone with his own kids either, ever, I should have refused male nurses testing DH, male teachers shouldn't exist etc because xwe have to assume they're all waiting to rape our kids.

Never let a new potential life partner see, hear or know about your dc until you have been seeing them at least 3 years, have had them fully vetted and the dc are over 18.

Don't be so dramatic. No one has said that. There's always someone who'll take reasonable responses and turn them into something else though, so I'm not sure why I'm surprised.

Except I never said, ‘you just don’t know, so no’. Though it’s pretty self explanatory why you have had to invent extremes about what I have said.

Quite.

Yes! Back off vultures. Judgemental twats.

Sorry OP, the first thing that jumped out at me was the meeting of the kids. My eyebrows nearly hit the ceiling. I know that's not the focus of your post, but many of us will struggle to see beyond that.
Anyway, his comment to you was indeed shitty, and designed to keep you in your place and make you feel insecure/lucky to have him. Tread carefully. If there's a pattern of this, then get rid.

And you're 100% not pathetic for feeling hurt.

Well given that she can’t read him correctly in terms of a response he made to a comment of hers, and had to start a thread agonising over it, given that she has been dismissive and defensive when challenged, I wouldn’t credit her with being able to read him in terms of safeguarding issues at all, tbh.