30 Times People Criticized Their Partners And Had A Price To Pay

We reached out to the author of this post to talk about her experience and discuss how bullying and criticism can ruin a marriage. Millie Barnes said that she was really surprised at the amount of attention her story received. 

"One of the replies that really stood out to me was a young woman in her thirties who told me that the same issues are still present in relationships, and that really shocked me. I guess we haven't come so far after all," she told Bored Panda. 

The incident took place a long time ago, in 1971, to be exact, but the user decided to share it only now. The reason is simply that she has gotten more active on Reddit recently. Millie has been looking and reading others’ stories for years, so she figured to post one of her own and "see what people's response was."

It seems that many found the thread relevant because only in a few days it has gone viral. It reached 17.7K upvotes and more than 1.3K comments where people started writing about their past and present experiences. Thinking about her own story, Millie remembers that it was a time when she was very young, "We hadn't even heard of the Equal Rights Amendment yet and my parents didn't care to hear what I was going through."

"They, along with a lot of other people, just simply said that I was married now and it was my job to be a good wife," the author told us that she didn’t agree with them and felt sick and tired of how she was being treated. "We did date for two and a half years but this was the late sixties and I was in high school, and there weren't that many things to fight about."

However, at the beginning of the relationship, she and her ex-husband didn’t fight and he didn’t seem that controlling at first. But some spouses wait until the wedding band is on to let their true selves come out. Millie said that the morning after they got married, he decided that he was the man of the house and was going to make requests and tell her what to do. 

"That didn't fly with me. It wasn't so much criticism … as a power struggle," since Millie felt she was an equal partner in their relationship, but he didn’t see it that way. "I got pregnant within a month after the marriage even though by that time I was very unhappy. But when my daughter was born I knew I was going to leave. I left when she was 6 months old."

When asked to share her thoughts on what a happy marriage should look like, Millie mentioned that respect is one of the most important components in a healthy coupledom. Often we seem to forget that "there are two people in a marriage and one doesn't get to tell the other one what to do."

"What I have discovered over the years is the vast majority of relationships in our culture are based on codependency. I've run my own business for 35 years and even the people I dated along the way either wanted to become a part of my business or tell me how to run it."

Needless to say, the author of this post does not have time for such nonsense: "I'm a very strong person who considers herself an autonomous being who doesn't need to live with a partner in order to be happy. I have had two very very long-term relationships in my life but we never live together." And she thinks that the reason they have continued for so long is that the personal boundaries stayed intact. 

Millie Barnes mentioned that she is now much better at recognizing red flags at the beginning of the relationship and ending it before it’s too late, or in her words, "when there is no emotional intimacy or the other person has no ability to effectively negotiate or reach compromises."