My boyfriend and I have very different styles of arguing. I had a pretty traumatic childhood. My dad died, my mom and I don’t have much of a relationship, and I grew up around explosive fights where people said horrible things to each other and then acted like nothing happened.
My boyfriend, on the other hand, hasn’t had much conflict in his life. He’s also quite a bit younger than I am.
When we argue, I get very logical and analytical, and honestly, I can be mean. I don’t usually yell, except when he talks over me, which happens all the time. I argue more like a trial attorney than a girlfriend.
I make sarcastic comments like, “Nice to see you doing that for them when you never did it for me.” Or when he talks about how his parents getting divorced when he was two affected him, I might respond with, “Oh, poor you,” because my dad died by suicide and a lot of other terrible things happened in my life.
I know trauma isn’t a competition, but it drives me crazy when he tries to explain behavior at 25 by saying things like, “I was bullied in school,” or something along those lines.
You say you’re the logical one in these arguments, but nothing you’ve described is particularly logical.
What you’ve described is contempt.
Your boyfriend tells you about something painful from his past and your response is essentially, “That’s not real suffering because I’ve had it worse.” That’s not reason. That’s arrogance.
Nobody wins the Trauma Olympics. There is no prize for having the worst childhood.
Your dad’s death was tragic. Your childhood sounds brutal. But neither of those things gives you permission to mock someone else’s wounds.
The line about his parents’ divorce is especially revealing. You write “TWO!” as if that settles the matter. But a two year old experiences instability and loss long before they can explain it. The fact that you dismiss it so quickly suggests you aren’t really listening.
You seem to have built part of your identity around being the person who survived worse things than everyone else. So when someone says, “This hurt me,” you hear competition instead of vulnerability.
The sarcasm is not honesty. It’s punishment.
And arguing like a lawyer is not a relationship skill. Lawyers are trained to win. Partners are supposed to understand each other.
If your boyfriend described a partner who mocked his pain, dismissed his experiences, and treated every disagreement like a courtroom battle, I’d tell him to ask whether that relationship feels emotionally safe.
You don’t sound evil. You sound wounded. But wounded people can still do real damage. If you keep treating your boyfriend’s pain as something to rank and ridicule, eventually he will stop trusting you with it.
And when that trust is gone, the relationship is already in trouble.