He Physically Attacked Me
My boyfriend’s grandpa physically attacked me during Thanksgiving. For some background, I’m a 28-year-old girl, and my partner is a 29-year-old guy. His grandpa is genuinely a terrible person, but my partner loves him for some reason. In all honesty, it’s pretty much for no reason.
This man is old, rude, and thinks it’s hilarious to upset people on purpose. His own family members usually bear most of the brunt of this bizarre habit of his. His own wife, as in my boyfriend’s grandma, cannot stand him. Meanwhile, everyone else just ignores or enables him.
Now, on to the story of what went down last night. We were all at his uncle’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and at first, everything was going perfectly fine. We were all sitting on the couch, drinking a bit, and playing catch up with each other.
We had been there for maybe half an hour or so at the time when things started to get weird. So I’m sitting on the couch facing the fireplace. This is an open-concept room, so there is a table and chairs set against the back of the couch where his grandpa is holding court.
Everyone is apparently discussing my career behind my back at the table. I work for a newly developing industry that is still largely outside the mainstream, so people think it’s exciting. That’s when he started.
Grandpa grabs my ponytail from behind and starts jerking my head back and forth very forcefully while telling a few people about my job. I am panicking at this point. I am completely still thanks to my awesome fight, flight, or freeze response.
My partner laughs until I grab his leg and panic yell at him to get him off of me. He grabs his grandpa’s hand and pries his claws out of my hair. This whole ordeal takes maybe about three minutes or so from start to finish. I’m destroyed.
The connotations of grabbing a woman by her hair are extremely unsettling and I’ve had issues with another male family member groping me in the past, so I start to shut down. This man has just put his hands on me in an open and clearly negative way.
I’m red, rashy, and quietly crying while also too physically frozen and shocked to move. My partner asks me if I’m okay, but I’m too upset to respond besides saying “fine” and ducking my head away. Later in the car, he yells at me for overreacting because “it wasn’t really that bad.”
He claims that I’m making too big of a deal about it, and that this is just how his grandpa is. Then he yells at me some more, asking what I expected him to do.
Then he asks if I want to press charges. How do I tell him that the thought of ever seeing his grandpa again makes me want to puke? That he left me feeling vulnerable and made it worse by negating my feelings as I was sobbing in the car?
We had to go back to that house for family pictures later that night and I cried the whole way over because I kept having panic attacks about his grandpa cornering me in the bathroom or something.
This is a big deal, right? I’m so hurt and uncomfortable, and my heart is racing just typing this all out. I literally just started crying again. Story credit: Reddit / lifeishardforbri