After work yesterday, Mr. W and I had a talk against his will about our recent strife. By talk, I mean it was hybrid argument, crying (me), jaw-dropping, hugging, more crying (me). He’d originally wanted to take me for some hot-and-sour soup since I was dying from my ailment and hadn’t eaten all day, and altho I turned him down, when he walked me to my car I ambushed him with “Are we ever gonna talk about this?”

The jaw-dropping part was his take on what happened that night. To him, I initiated the altercation when I talked/complained about the people in front of us in an “above-normal loud” voice to goad them into a response, and that “it was reasonable” that the guy turned around and shot me his comment. I was abhorred he thought the guy’s reaction was “reasonable,” and he clarified that he didn’t say the GUY was reasonable, but that it was reasonable to expect a person to turn around and say something if he overheard something he found offensive. (I think the guy WAY overreacted, personally, which in my opinion is what actually started the problems. I feel the guy was deliberately confrontational.) Mr. W also said the guy had “a right” to turn around and tell me to shut up because I cussed him out. I again said I did not cuss him out nor did I even talk to him directly at that point. Mr. W “remembers” that I was shooting words or comments or something at the guy the whole time the guy was telling me to shut up, which is another thing that dropped my jaw because I KNOW I didn’t say anything at that point, the two men were the only ones talking. I asked Mr. W to tell me what he heard me say, and he had nothing. I told Mr. W I felt it was an attack on my character that he felt I went around trying to goad strangers into altercations.
I think as to how we saw what happened that night, it would never mesh and we would always have opposite opinions. It may have to be one of those “agree to disagree” points.

As to Mr. W’s reaction that night, what he did, this is the mental process he went thru, as he explained to me. He said that he acted on “training and instinct,” which told him that the goal here is to “diffuse the situation before it escalates further.” His gut analysis is that for the situation to be over, the guy and I have to stop talking to each other (not that I was talking to him to begin with), so he was faced with 2 options: get the guy to shut up, or get me to shut up. The guy is a stranger to him, so Mr. W can’t predict nor control the guy’s reaction if he asserted some sort of attempt to shut the guy up. He thought if he told the guy to “shut up and turn around”, the guy may stand up and now want a physical confrontation, which doesn’t bring Mr. W to his ultimate goal of diffusing the situation. But I was not a stranger and he felt he had control and influence over me, so the best route to him at this point was to shut ME up. He didn’t and doesn’t feel that the method of shutting me up with his shushes and whispers of “stop it, watch the show” was disrespectful to me and was in complete shock at how offensively I took his apparently effective tactic to end the situation.
So I said that in matters of human emotions and bonds, the “rules” of training don’t apply. It’s not a situation with a black and white method to apply based on a work-related training handbook. There were feelings and loyalties involved. He said he wasn’t thinking about how it’d “look” to strangers or to me if he did this or that, because the goal to him was not about appearance or whom he stands behind, but in the act of ending a situation. As far as boyfriend-rules or social-rules, he claims to be socially ignorant and thus only relies on his “training and instinct” and that those things are hard if not impossible to change. He said if the guy had gotten up and become a physical threat, he would’ve stepped in to defend me physically, but that he didn’t feel I was in actual danger or in need of help so punching the guy out at that point was unnecessary and ideally to be avoided. It is also Mr. W’s opinion that in de-escalating the situation the way he did, he WAS protecting me by removing me from a situation before it got more volatile.
His offer of compromise, given almost with gritted teeth as he feels he did nothing wrong that night given his logic behind the whole thing, was that he would TRY to consider my feelings or potential emotions before he acts based on “training and instinct” next time.

I don’t know what to think. But I am glad he explained all this to me even tho he didn’t even want to address it to begin with.