This Redditor has a 12-year-old son and a boyfriend with whom she’s been together for four years. The mom and kid have a little tradition they’ve been practicing for nearly a decade. The two spend a specifically scheduled day together every month but, for whatever odd reason, recently found themselves interrupted by the boyfriend’s antics. 

Man sabotages girlfriend’s tradition of having a day out with her 12-year-old son

Woman snaps at him and tells him that he’s not as “important”

“AITA for being a [jerk] towards my bf after he ruined my day?” – this web user took to one of Reddit’s most judgmental communities, asking its members whether she was wrong to lash out at her boyfriend for spoiling her and her 12-year-old son’s tradition of spending a day out together. The post managed to garner nearly 14K upvotes as well as 2.8K comments discussing the situation. 

Relationships are rocky, and although it may sound cliché, communication is the go-to solution to any issue. The couple in today’s story has been a thing for 4 years. The woman has a 12-year-old son from a previous relationship, and the two have created their own tradition that they’ve been practicing since the little one was 5. Each month, the mom and her offspring go out on a specifically scheduled “date,” and it has never been a problem for her boyfriend until recently, when the man, what seems like deliberately, decided to continuously interfere with their plans. Naturally, the youngster wasn’t pumped about the guy’s antics, so upon arriving home he cussed him out and headed straight to his room. The woman backed her son, which eventually led to this whole “I’m important too” conversation that provoked the man to storm out.

To get a more in-depth view of the situation, Bored Panda decided to reach out to a few professionals. Our first expert is Ashley Parker, a relationship therapist based in the beautiful city of York, UK. We briefed Ashley on the situation and invited her to offer some commentary: “I think the difficulty is that jealousy is an uncomfortable feeling, but very normal, and actually being open about those feelings will undoubtedly lessen the sting, but as it perhaps does seem like an abnormal response, the way that his girlfriend responds to this will influence being able to have an open, curious conversation. If she’s accusatory, he will be defensive and vice versa.”

“He may be having a response to this that’s attached to another experience of being excluded in childhood or another relationship. It’s complex, but having a conversation where each person uses ‘I’ statements is important. For example: I am wondering if you’re feeling jealous that I’m going out with my son without you? Do you feel able to share with me how you’re feeling? I wonder what you’re making this mean about you? And about our relationship. It’s important for me to be able to spend time with my son alone so that I can give him my full attention. It’s also important to me that we have that kind of quality time too.”

Lastly, Ashley Parker added: “Having read the post, it would seem that her interpretation is that he intentionally ruined or tried to interrupt the day, and it sounds like her son felt that too. ‘I’m important too’ says to me that he’s vying for her attention/position. If his intention was to disrupt their day, that is intentional; but he may well have done it very unconsciously because of his underlying feelings of exclusion. If his daughter is 20, I would imagine there is less likelihood that he has these kinds of set-out days with her and he could be envying this.”

It leads to a fight, provoking the man to rush out and give the author a dose of the silent treatment

Our second expert is Sarah Lee, a UK-based psychotherapist who works with adult survivors of childhood trauma and people from dysfunctional and chaotic family backgrounds, to whom we posed similar questions. “It is normal to feel jealous, although we are often told growing up that jealousy is a ‘bad emotion’ or that we shouldn’t feel it. So it’s normal to feel jealous, but it’s not ok to sabotage someone’s day out, call them a b*tch or ignore them.”

“Growing up, we need to learn how to identify our feelings, tolerate them, let them out and communicate them to others. If the boyfriend had better emotional skills, this would look something like: ‘I notice I’m feeling really agitated about your day out with your son. I feel like you drop everything to be with him and I’m not as important. I never felt important growing up as my parents didn’t have time for me so I know it’s a sore spot for me when it happens again.’”

“Notice how in the example above, the boyfriend takes responsibility for his feelings, communicates them in a calm way and uses lots of statements that begin with ‘I’. He also correctly identifies that his response is only partly about now, and that a lot of the emotional pain actually comes from the past. It can be tempting to say things like ‘It’s not my fault I’m cross, you left me out so what do you expect?’ But this escalates the situation, and is likely to result in retaliation and a fight.”

“The problem is that these emotional skills are pretty advanced and anyone who grew up in a family without emotional skills is not going to learn these by themselves. In fact, we often learn unhealthy ways of communicating, like being passive-aggressive, name calling and using the silent treatment as punishment, which is what happened in the original example.”

BP then asked Sarah Lee what one should do if they find themselves in a similar position: “If there is a pattern of sabotage, passive aggressiveness, name calling or silent treatment, then this is abusive and the child and partner should be protected from this. Nobody should have to walk on eggshells around a partner or step-parent, and abuse is often far more subtle than the more easily recognised physical abuse.”

The woman then went online to get some neutral feedback since she thought she might have overreacted