S/O Cake Smashing. When a couple wrestles.

[SiotehCat]

Some BG: Dh and I love to wrestle. He tries to pin me down, I know some of his weak spots, its a lot of fun. We do this almost nightly. Its a huge stress reliever and we both enjoy it.

Cake Smashing, in the original thread, was called disrespectful, cruel and passive aggressive. I disagree with that, because I think that if both people want something, how can it be any of those things? This got me thinking about something that happened many years ago.

Dh and I were living in Texas and discussing the possibility of moving back to his hometown in DC.

His best friend of many many years, Ed, tells DH that they need a roommate very badly. He had just met and married someone in the last 6 months. This was their first place together, but she lost her job a little while back. The only problem is, he needs someone to move in NOW. Ed and wife lived in DC.

DH and I rush a plan together. He will quit his job and I will take time off my job. We will go to DC and find jobs. Then, I will go back to TX and pack up our place and bring DS. 

When we arrive at Ed's apartment, we are given a loft with its own bathroom. I don't know if a loft is the same everywhere, but in this situation, it was a bedroom without the privacy. One wall is open for the people in the living room to see. No privacy.

DH and I get started with the job searching and the apartment searching with some wrestling on our downtime. We also make fun of each other sometimes. In fact, the making fun of each other usually leads to the wrestling. Because we only had the one bedroom, we couldn't do all of the usual running after each other, so it was pretty tame.

Anyways, less then two weeks in, Ed's wife tells us that we need to leave. She thinks our relationship is disgusting and unhealthy and doesn't want to be near it. Ed left the apartment at the beginning of the conversation.

Dh and I were both pretty upset, and I would have loved to say a few things to her, but I had to fly into action to figure out what we were going to do.

For a long time, I have been upset with her for judging our relationship like that. I was upset that she thought she had the right to decide what a healthy relationship was for us. I was also upset Ed pressured us into moving, knew that we had turned our lives upside down, then kicked us out without warning. It could have ended very badly for us.

So, some of the reactions to the cake smashing thread made me think about this situation from long ago. I am wondering now if Ed's wife was right to dictate how a couple behaves with each other in her home. Were Dh and I wrong to assume that, because we were paying for the room, that we could use it as we wished?

[poundcake]

I think the issue of when and how you were asked to leave is a separate etiquette one, but I can certainly see that extreme physicality like wrestling might be very disturbing to bystanders who didn't know. So often, there is a blurry line in that behavior between playful and genuinely aggressive. Also, your roommate's wife may have been on the unwilling end of wrestling or something and can't see it as just a fun thing you two do.

[NyaChan]

I hate to say it because I know it left you in such a lurch, but as long as you weren't paying for time that you did not get to stay in the room, I think she was ok to express that she wanted you to leave and was uncomfortable.  That kind of activity is...I can't think of a good word here.  But if I saw someone getting physical with someone in an open room where I was watching and their bed was there, I'd feel like I was the unwilling viewer of someone else's foreplay.  It probably would have been better to forgo something like that when you didn't really have the privacy for it. 

ETA:  Of course there may not have been anything sexual in the interaction, but watching a man trying to pin down a woman while she is fighting/wrestling back, would still have made me a little uneasy unless of course it was explained to me that it was sports-like wrestling.

[jmarvellous]

I'm not sure how to answer this because you're asking several very different questions.

I do think you can kick out roommates with notice if you disapprove of their conduct in your house. Especially if you're in a room without proper walls.

I assume wrestling is both noisy and obvious. I would not be cool with the disruption. Couldn't you have cooled it for a couple of weeks? BUT I also think it's possible she was bothered by one or more aspects of your relationship or your residence in her private home and wrestling was just the excuse or final straw for her.

And lastly, I do find grown people wrestling obnoxious. No matter whether it's on TV or in my house.

[WillyNilly]

Well as I said in the cake smashing thread, I think its fine to do in private (and perhaps other places).  I think the same of something like wrestling.  Its 100% ok for two consenting adults to engage in wrestling (or countless other things) in privacy... but you two weren't being private.  I get it you didn't really have the option of privacy but that's not the point, the point is by doing your wrestling in front of other people, in their home, you were to an extent including them in it to a degree.  And the other people were not consenting to any level of inclusion.

She shouldn't have judged your relationship, but I think she was fine to be at odds with your lifestyle.  I think its on par to something like walking around naked.  In your own private home go for it.  In a roommates situation, you confine it to private areas.  If your bedroom isn't private then you wait until the roommates are out.

[Zilla]

They are the ones that are juvenile and need to grow up.  I have been married over 10 years and dh and I still wrestle. I love it when I can topple him over with him being twice my size. 


Now if you were in a public park/restaurant/party and went into a full on floor wrestle, that might raise my eyebrow.  But in your home or a place with very close friends or family?  Nope.


Did they have the right to ask you leave because something you did bothered them?  Yes.  Not everyone will approve or like it and have to tolerate it.  It sounds like it's one of their hills to die on.

[SiotehCat]

I'm not sure how to answer this because you're asking several very different questions.

I do think you can kick out roommates with notice if you disapprove of their conduct in your house. Especially if you're in a room without proper walls.

I assume wrestling is both noisy and obvious. I would not be cool with the disruption. Couldn't you have cooled it for a couple of weeks? BUT I also think it's possible she was bothered by one or more aspects of your relationship or your residence in her private home and wrestling was just the excuse or final straw for her.

And lastly, I do find grown people wrestling obnoxious. No matter whether it's on TV or in my house.

It was going to be much more then a couple of weeks. It turned out to be less then two weeks, but the original plan was for over a year.

Ed had told Dh and I that the apartment was a 3 bedroom. Dh and I would pay for two of the bedrooms because of DS. When getting there, we realized that it wasn't a 3 bedroom. It was a 1 bedroom with a loft and a study. Both the loft and the study were open to the rest of the apartment. The loft was above the living room, but you could still see a lot of it from the living room.

[Hmmmmm]

I've never been around in home wrestling that is not loud or doesn't have the potential to damage furniture or people.  I don't let kids wrestle in my house for those reasons so I would have been uncomfortable with two adults behaving that way.

I do think she was out of line calling your behavior unhealthy.  My first course of action would have been to ask you not to wrestle in my home.

But I'm curious as to why you guys were spending your first two weeks there looking for an apartment if you guys were moving their to help this couple out with their rent. 

[NyaChan]

I don't know, having found that their friend had been less than forthcoming about the set up of the apartment, I would think they were hoping to find a better situation.  Who would call that a 3 bedroom apartment and then not explain that they were really just additional rooms, not closed bedrooms?  Though personally I would have asked for pictures and more information before moving in, this guy had to have been doing some sort of verbal dance around the fact that the two rooms Sioteh would be renting had no doors.

[SiotehCat]

I've never been around in home wrestling that is not loud or doesn't have the potential to damage furniture or people.  I don't let kids wrestle in my house for those reasons so I would have been uncomfortable with two adults behaving that way.

I do think she was out of line calling your behavior unhealthy.  My first course of action would have been to ask you not to wrestle in my home.

But I'm curious as to why you guys were spending your first two weeks there looking for an apartment if you guys were moving their to help this couple out with their rent.

It was mostly job searching, but I did do some apartment searching because it was obvious after the first week that it wasn't going to work out. I left it out because my post was already long and it wasn't important. During one of our conversations with them the first week, they mentioned that our cats could not come with us. Ed had told us that it was fine as long as we paid the extra for them, but apparently, he hadn't run that by his wife.

Also, they decided that they no longer wanted to give up the study that was suppose to be our DS's bedroom. While we could share a bedroom with our DS for a little while, he really does need his own bedroom.

[sourwolf]

I'm not sure how to answer this because you're asking several very different questions.

I do think you can kick out roommates with notice if you disapprove of their conduct in your house. Especially if you're in a room without proper walls.

I assume wrestling is both noisy and obvious. I would not be cool with the disruption. Couldn't you have cooled it for a couple of weeks? BUT I also think it's possible she was bothered by one or more aspects of your relationship or your residence in her private home and wrestling was just the excuse or final straw for her.

And lastly, I do find grown people wrestling obnoxious. No matter whether it's on TV or in my house.

It was going to be much more then a couple of weeks. It turned out to be less then two weeks, but the original plan was for over a year.

Ed had told Dh and I that the apartment was a 3 bedroom. Dh and I would pay for two of the bedrooms because of DS. When getting there, we realized that it wasn't a 3 bedroom. It was a 1 bedroom with a loft and a study. Both the loft and the study were open to the rest of the apartment. The loft was above the living room, but you could still see a lot of it from the living room.

I think you dodged a bullet.  A year is a very long time to live with another couple when you have a son and no actual private space.  Personally I would have found the wrestling annoying so it looks like things worked out all around.

[Wonderflonium]

DH and I get started with the job searching and the apartment searching with some wrestling on our downtime.

Why were you and your boyfriend looking for an apartment right away if the reason for moving to DC was to be the roommates of these people?

[bah12]

I haven't read the other thread and do agree with you that in most cases, if the action is something that each member of the couple enjoys and wants and can do it privately (I think wedding cake smashing is actually ok when they both agree), then there's nothing wrong with it.

In your case, you were living in someone else's home and your bedroom didn't even have a door that you could close to wrestle in private.  I can see how someone would view this as an aggressive and even very intimate act and be uncomfortable that it was happening where they could witness. 

I do think that she had every right to ask you to leave her home, but I also think that if it were me, I'd talk to you about it first and either ask that you not wrestle in the home or at the least do it when no one is home (if I wasn't concerned about something being broken/damaged).  Before I just kicked you out.

That being said, I think her outward judgement of your relationship was rude.  She has every right to think that your relationship is disgusting and unhealthy, but there was no reason to say that to you.  She could have simply said "It makes me very uncomfortable to witness the wrestling and too uncomfortable to continue this living arrangement" and left it at that.

[NyaChan]

With the new information, it sounds like the wife changed her mind about having someone live there with them or was unhappy with the situation and was looking for a way out. 

[SiotehCat]

With the new information, it sounds like the wife changed her mind about having someone live there with them or was unhappy with the situation and was looking for a way out.

I think that Ed probably wasn't completely truthful with his wife or with us. I started getting that feeling immediately.

However, I still think she had a real problem with our relationship. She sounded genuinely disgusted when she was speaking to us.