I come on too strong

The topic of the forum came up in a conversation. When it did, I jumped right in. “One of these days, I’m going to get the owner in a room and tell him how unfair it was for him to take moderator status away from a woman moderator for just attempting to get involved with another member. But he never found reason to take away your moderator status, even though you actually had an affair with a married member on the forum.”

He replied, “That’s because I was not exposed by name on the forum like the other moderator was.”

Jokingly, I told him, “That could be arranged.”

He didn’t like that much at all. Then starting to feel defensive, he said, “You come on too strong around people and that’s why you have no friends. You need to relax a little bit more. You can be the life of the party if you changed.”

I started thinking to myself, here we go again. He is telling me how I need to change for the sake of everyone, but he doesn’t need to change for the sake of our marriage. I then replied, “I don’t care to be the life of the party. I thought you said the reason why I don’t have friends is due to the language barrier?”

He said, “Yes, that is one reason.”

I quickly replied, “Then what is your reason for not having any friends?”

Not having a reply to that, he goes on, “The other reason you don’t have friends is because you come on too strong and make people feel uncomfortable. This is part of your personality and you need to change it.”

What came to mind was a few months ago when he was down talking me about my character or about me as a woman. At the time, he was finding faults in everything I did. I’ll be damned if he is going to revert back to that again! I told him, “I have never trusted people in the past and never had friends most of my adult life. You act like you don’t even know me, when in fact, you know all about my past and how much of a loner I was. Why don’t you give me an example of how I come on too strong, so I can understand what you mean?”

After thinking for a while, he could not give me an example.Probably because there wasn’t one. I then ran down a list of people we met over the years and asked about each and every person. I would ask, “Did I come on too strong?”. He would reply, “No, you did not”, each and every time. At this point, I thought he must have just thrown the you-come-on-too-strong into the conversation, only because he didn’t know what else to say. I asked him again for an example and still he could not give me one. He then began to get upset saying he didn’t want to talk about it anymore and he should have never brought it up.