Opening jars can be a nuisance. If you have a weak grip and little to no arm strength, a jar of pickles can be hard to access. But that’s usually the rule for new jars – once you’ve opened them, you put the lid on more loosely so that it opens more easily next time. But what if someone purposefully put the lids back on too tightly?

That’s what happened to this woman. She fought with her husband over him putting lids on jars too tightly. After five years, the woman had enough and realized the husband might be doing this on purpose. She decided to file for divorce, but, aware of how strange her reason might be, she decided to ask the Internet to weigh in.

A husband used an interesting tactic to exert control over his wife – putting lids on jars too tightly

Image credits:  Felipe Queiroz / pexels (not the actual photo)

The woman had enough one day and decided to ask him for a divorce

Image credits: Heather McKean / unsplash (not the actual photo)

Image credits: MART PRODUCTION / pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Karolina Kaboompics / pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Karolina Kaboompics / pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: DirectionProper9461

The wife later updated her post and listed other strange things her husband did

At first glance, this story might seem crazy and absurd. However, emotional abuse can take a lot of different forms in a relationship. As many people already pointed out in the comments, the woman filed for divorce for the husband’s questionable behavior, not the tightly shut jars.

In a later update, the wife detailed other odd things the husband did to exert control over her. The jar lids weren’t the only thing the husband lied about. “I had to move my office from my dining nook to a locked room because he was using my workspace on days I went to the office,” the Redditor wrote about another case of her husband’s strange behavior.

“That was no big deal except he was moving important documents that I needed for work. He denied moving anything and swore he was just setting up his laptop and maybe using my printer. I started taking pictures of my desk before I left for work and things were being moved. He was the only one home.”

The husband also wanted to limit his wife’s freedom to go out by pressuring her not to have her own car. “He totaled my car twice in 5 years, even though he rarely drives it,” the user u/DirectionProper9461 wrote.

“The second time was right after we married and he put a lot of pressure on me to use the insurance money to pay off his car instead of replacing mine because I don’t drive a lot and sometimes bike to work. We live in the suburbs and there is no public transport. He proposed that I could just use his car when I needed to but I really wanted to continue having my own car.”

But perhaps his most concerning demand was about having kids. “As soon as we married he was pressuring me to have a child,” the woman wrote. “His plan for child care was for me to watch the baby while working. I wanted to save a year of child care expenses before we talked about a baby. He didn’t want to. I just felt weird about it, so I got an IUD to make sure we didn’t have an accident. He was angry.”

The term ‘gaslighting’ is often misused today, but it actually means serious emotional abuse

Image credits:  BĀBI / unsplash (not the actual photo)

Words like ‘narcissist,’ ‘traumatized,’ and ‘misogyny’ get thrown around social media pretty lightly nowadays. The film Bodies Bodies Bodies made quite a poignant observation about this: “‘Gaslight’ is like one of the most overused words ever, to like the point of annihilation,” one of the characters says. “It doesn’t mean anything, other than the fact that you read the Internet or congrats, you have a Twitter account.”

Merriam-Webster even named ‘gaslighting’ the most overused word of 2022. Today, people like to use it when someone simply disagrees with them. Some people might wrongly accuse their partners, family members, or coworkers of gaslighting when, in actuality, they’re just having a simple disagreement.

While many people do misuse the word ‘gaslight,’ its actual meaning is very serious. The National Domestic Violence Hotline describes gaslighting as an emotional abuse tactic that makes a victim question their reality.

Partners who gaslight do so because they want to have power and control over the other person. The gaslighter manipulates the gaslightee emotionally until they start to question their feelings, instincts, and sanity. When the victim no longer trusts their own perception, they’re more likely to stay in the abusive relationship.

Denial and forgetting are some gaslighting techniques. “The abusive partner pretends to have forgotten what actually occurred or denies things like promises made to the victim,” The Hotline writes.

The term ‘gaslight’ comes from a 1938 play Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton. It was later made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock titled Gas Light. In the film, a husband drives his wife crazy by making subtle changes to her environment.

He gradually, bit by bit, dims the flame in a gas lamp, eventually making her question what is real and what isn’t. Because this representation of controlling behavior used by manipulators was so accurate, mental health experts began to refer to the phenomena as ‘gaslighting.’

Many people shared similar stories about their emotionally abusive exes

Commenters told the author that she’s definitely not the jerk here, and they said the husband was gaslighting her

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