Dealing with DH can be stressful. He doesn't know how to deal with stress himself, so he shuts down, stops talking, and pisses me off.

If things don't go the way he thinks they should, if things are temporarily out of his control, if he doesn't get the answer he wants - the little vein on the side of his head starts to throb and his voice gets really quiet and I get pissed.

Two nights ago his friend said something about the construction DH didn't want to hear. Even unnamed friend noticed and called last night to go out to get a snack. We went, and before snacks were served, he asked DH, "So. What happened to upset you last night?" Now we couldn't tell him that he said something DH didn't want to hear, so DH just started blabbing on about how "this one didn't" and "that one wouldn't" and "I thought" and "we should have" and on and on and on and on...

As he talked he calmed down and became more reasonable, he understood that it's not our fault, that things will work out in the long run and that you have to kiss a few frogs - wait, wrong metaphor. But you understand where I'm going with this. He got human again.

When he went to pay for our snacks, unnamed friend asked me what happened. Again, I couldn't tell him he was the one who upset DH, so I just vaguely mentioned he was annoyed by people not doing what he thought they should do when he thought they should do it... So when DH came back to the table, unnamed friend kind of directed the conversation back to what had happened and calmed DH down some more.

Thanks, unnamed friend!

This morning, en route to work, we were even able to discuss the construction situation calmly and rationally even though we were talking about how we didn't get what we thought we were going to get and how I was going to call the architect and, well, demand it anyway.

Keep your fingers crossed for me - I'm not that good at demanding...