Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
I’m having a fight with my girlfriend and I don’t know if I’m being an asshole about this or my girlfriend is. For reference, we’re both 22.
To keep things short, I’m planning on getting my first tattoo. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time and I’ve put a lot of thought into it coming up with a design and researching tattoo styles and artists before finally making an appointment. I have never been quiet about this and have mentioned it to my girlfriend many times before. It’s going to be on my shoulder, not visible unless I wear a muscle tee or take my shirt off and while it isn’t going to cover the whole thing it WILL be pretty large.
The moment and I mean THE MOMENT I made the appointment, my girlfriend freaked out at me. She has alternated between demanding how I could do this without her permission and why didn’t I ask her first and how this was such a surprise and a betrayal. She is saying over and over that she won’t be attracted to me any more after I get it done, it’s a boundary violation and that this is almost like I cheated on her except its worse because she can never not see it once its there. At least with cheating she could pretend it never happened
And yes she said permission.
I told her that I’d been talking about this for months, that she had never asked for permission to get some of her piercings (bull ring, nipples) and that even though I don’t think they’re attractive I supported her decision and never criticized her for it. I didn’t even say anything when she told me it was a male piercer. She said that this was different because she could take those out but this was permanent and couldn’t be taken back and anyway we had an obligation to each other to not make changes like this.
I said it was my body and she said that if I got it, she was going to break up with me. I told her that this was ridiculous and she stormed out back to her apartment and we haven’t talked in three days. I know she’s gotten my texts because I see she’s read them and I know she’s been active on social media making posts about being disrespected in relationships.
Am I really the asshole here for doing this or is she right and girlfriends can say no to choices their boyfriends are making?
Talking Aggravated Tense Times
Alright TATT, I’m going to be honest: I’m incredibly tempted to tell you to dump her and call it a night. But I don’t think that’s going to be particularly helpful, if only because this is the sort of argument that children have and holy crap the two of you are very young.
So, cards on the table: as someone who is extensively tattooed, I’m not unbiased on the topic. I also take a very dim view of the idea that one’s partner has a right to override one’s bodily autonomy. Doubly so when they misuse “boundaries” as a way of trying to control someone. Boundaries are about how you will handle things, not what other people are “allowed” to do. That includes things like body modification. As I’m often saying: people can have an opinion, but they don’t get a vote.
Now that doesn’t mean that everyone gets a free-for-all. While our partners don’t get to veto decisions or control our bodies and our looks, we do have a responsibility to one another to at least take their opinions into consideration when we’re making large decisions. You don’t have to follow it, but hearing them out and engaging with them on the topic is baseline respect. Particularly if it’s a topic that they feel strongly on.
And again, in fairness, this isn’t a small easily overlooked change you’re thinking of making that she wouldn’t notice if you didn’t call her attention to it. While it may not be like making a large impulse purchase with funds from the shared account, but it is a pretty significant change to the topology of your body. Whether that’s going to be enough to totally kill her desire for you is up in the air, but it will permanently alter your aesthetic. It doesn’t take long to adjust to it – in fact you’ll be surprised how quickly it starts to feel like it was always there – but it can be a striking difference in the before/after of it all.
And she’s right in as far as her she can take out her septum and nipple piercings but your tattoo is a permanent change. While some tattoos can be removed, it’s a lengthy and expensive process and results are incredibly variable. You could spend used-car levels of money to get a tattoo lasered, but you aren’t guaranteed to have virgin-looking skin again. And yes, it can be a deal breaker to someone.
(See how reasonable I’m being? I would like a cookie for how reasonable I’m being on a topic that I feel very unreasonable on, please.)
So with all that having been said: I think your girlfriend’s reaction is so over the top that it seems absurd to the point of bad writing. It’s the sort of reaction I would expect from either an incredibly toxic and controlling person or someone who has a very weird history with tattoos. So I have to wonder what her exact problem is, especially since she isn’t inimically opposed to body mods. Nipple and septum piercings aren’t exactly the most common choice for someone who only is comfortable with standard-issue-done-at-the-mall piercings. Those required going to a piercer, and likely in the same shop as a host of tattoo artists.
(Also, side note: don’t get your piercings done at a store by someone with a piercing gun. Yes, I realize that’s not as common as it used to be, but seriously, even if you’re just getting basic ear piercings, go to a professional piercer.)
Now under normal circumstances, I would tell you to sit down with her and have an Awkward Conversation with her about this, where the format would make it harder for the two of you to fly off the handle and escalate things further. You would get your chance to talk about why this is important to you, what getting your first tattoo means and why you’ve been wanting this for as long as you have. Then, after you’ve said your peace and she’s held her questions until you were done, she can explain what her problem with it is while you hold back from interrupting her until she’s done. It would be important for both of you to listen without interrupting, so that you don’t veer off topic or end up raising the temperature through hyperbole or unhelpful tit-for-tat comparisons.
While you may not come to see eye to eye about this, you would at least have a better understanding about where you two stood on the matter. You may not have changed anyone’s minds, but you both would know you’ve been heard and understood and you can decide if this is the hill you want to die on. You would have to choose whether your desire to fulfil this dream is going to be greater than your desire to stay in this relationship, but you could at least make that choice knowing that you had given it serious consideration.
That, of course, requires that you both actually talk about this.
Here’s the thing: there’s a lot of information I don’t have here, including how long you’ve been together. If you’ve been together since you were teens, I could maybe understand why a change like this might feel threatening or overwhelming. Similarly, if you’ve only been together for a year or less, I’d suggest you wash your hands of the whole matter and move on. This sort of conflict when you’re still in the NRE stage of a relationship is a sign that this isn’t going to work, even if you do sit down to talk it out.
But the thing that bothers me the most is that she seems to be acting like a teenager and not a grown-ass adult. The silent treatment like this is the sort of thing I expect from sophomores in high-school, not people who should be looking towards graduating from college.
I suggest texting her and telling her that you want to have a serious talk about this. Her response will tell you whether there’s even a point of trying to take things further. If she’s absolutely refusing to talk to you and is just subtweeting on her socials, then I don’t think there’s much more to be done.
Me? I say keep the appointment and let the chips fall where they may. Either she will come around, or you’ll have ended a relationship that needed to end. Plus you’ll have a sick new tattoo and a relationship with the artist when you’re ready for your next one.
Good luck.
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
I know you say that snooping is bad but what happens when you discover something without meaning to, especially when you weren’t snooping?
Last week, my laptop was getting repaired and my wife loaned me hers so that I could work until I got mine back. I take privacy seriously, so the only app I opened or looked at was the web browser, since I could remote login to everything I needed. What I didn’t realize was that notifications were still on and so when a WhatsApp message pinged in, I saw it was a message to my wife from her group chat. I would’ve ignored it and tried to turn off notifications but I saw my name in the preview. So I moused over before it disappeared and what I saw was literally insulting. As in, they were calling me an asshole and other names.
I was confused, until another message came as someone replied, saying more unkind things about me. Then a little later, a third came from my wife – from her phone, I assume – that was just crying-laughing emjois.
This is when I gave in and clicked on the notification and saw the messages. My wife had been dragging me in this group chat and everyone else (around 10 or so of her friends) were agreeing and continuing the thoughts about what an asshole I was.
This caught me by complete surprise. My wife and I had hit a rough patch last year when we both were dealing with a lot of stress (me, at risk of layoffs when my company was downsizing, her being passed over for a promotion she had been promised, all at the same time as we were scraping to pay medical bills for a cancer scare), but I thought that had been over. We went to couples therapy and individual therapy, talked everything through, did a lot of crying, apologizing and working on remembering that we were a team. I thought we had healed and moved past everything. Instead, I find that she had been keeping a rolling commentary of all my flaws and mistakes for the entertainment of her friends and how she could do so much better.
Doctor, I’ve tried to put this out of my mind. I don’t know how to tell her I’ve seen this without being accused of snooping, but I also can’t ignore that people are talking like this behind my back. It would be one thing if it were strangers, but these are people I see at parties and invite to my house, who I cook for and my wife at the center of this.
Am I right to be upset about this? Do I confront my wife with what I know? Should I pretend I didn’t see any of this and just tell myself she’s blowing off steam? I don’t want to tell her she can’t talk about me to her friends but this is honestly hurtful, especially when I had no idea she felt this way.
Help!
Main Villain In The Group Chat
First I want to say that what you’re feeling is understandable and reasonable. Finding out that folks are talking about you behind your back can feel like a slap to the face and confirmation of the worst anxiety you may have had. So the way this is bothering you is entirely understandable.
But with that in mind, let me ask you a sincere and serious question MVGC: if they weren’t talking about you, but someone else’s husband, how would the conversation look to you? If it didn’t feel so personal, would this seem as harsh and cruel as it does right now? Or would it feel more like a roast? Yeah, talking shit about someone behind their back feels mean, but there’s actively insulting and mocking someone and then there’s venting frustrations that you don’t mean in a safe space, where presumably you can do so without involving that person.
I ask, because as much as this stings, there’s a real difference in intent and what this behavior suggests about how your wife feels about you. People do have a right to vent, to say things that would seem hurtful and ugly if the wrong person overheard them.
Or do you want me to believe that you didn’t complain about your wife to your friends and co-workers (or your bartender, I guess) while you were having problems?
Someone saying unkind or insulting things in a private space doesn’t mean that they mean those things or that they’re just enjoying maligning and disrespecting them. Often, it’s a way of letting the feelings out safely when letting them out directly might lead to someone saying or doing something they can’t take back. Bottling them up is often worse, because the lack of an outlet means that they’re more likely to fester and become resentment and relationship poison. So better to drain the emotional pus in a supportive environment; the support and jokes may sting if the subject were to hear them, but it’s still better than to let it curdle into something far, far worse.
But as I said: there’s a difference between actively insulting and expressing contempt for someone and venting frustration. The latter is understandable, if painful. The former is troubling under the best of circumstances, and suggests that you really haven’t resolved that rough patch.
Now the fact that this hit you as such a surprise suggests to me that maybe this is just venting to the girls instead of taking things out on you. If things with your wife have improved and your day-to-day behavior has returned to levels of affection and care that you had before those hard times (or even exceed them), then I would be far less concerned. Sure, I guess it’s theoretically possible that this is a weird-ass Gone-Girl scenario where your wife is secretly so Machiavellian to put on a flawless false face while preparing your downfall. But unless you’ve also been fucking Emily Ratajkowski behind your wife’s back, Occam’s Razor suggests the former.
Of course, this doesn’t change that you saw what you saw and that it both hurts and bothers you. I think it’s entirely reasonable to wonder what this means about how your wife feels and whether it’s a sign that the hurts from the past are a lot closer to the surface and a lot less healed than you thought. But the only person who can really tell you what any of this means is your wife. And since there’s no subtle or tricksy way to get this information out of her, the best thing you can do is ask.
I suggest that you take your wife aside and say “hey, when I was using your laptop, some notifications from your group chat came in and I couldn’t help but see they were about me. It looks like you’re still upset with me; can we talk about what I saw on there?” Since you had been working with a couple’s therapist, you might suggest that you schedule an appointment with them to mediate the discussion. If you sincerely want to resolve this with your wife, it’s going to be important that both of you keep a level head. Having a trained and neutral third party to guide the conversation can help keep things both civil and productive. That can be pretty damn important, considering how personal and thorny the subject is.
What I don’t suggest is that you bottle this up or try to pretend that you didn’t see it. Talking things through with her (and, ideally, your couples therapist) is the best way forward.
Then, once things are more settled and less painful, you can start a group chat of your own so you have a place to vent your frustrations too.
Good luck.
