Am I overreacting after my boyfriend accidentally punched me?
i [18F] genuinely don’t know if I’m overreacting or if I should actually be concerned about my relationship.
My boyfriend [19M] has this habit of pretending to fight around me. Not actually hitting me obviously, but fake punching near me, dodging around dramatically, shadow boxing in front of me like he’s in some action movie. He thinks it’s funny and usually I just roll my eyes because he acts like an idiot half the time.
But something happened tonight that honestly shook me up.
We had spent the whole day together at the beach and then visited his grandma afterwards, so overall the day was actually really nice. Later that night we were standing at a bus stop waiting to go home and he started doing the fake boxing thing again.
This time I stepped forward at the wrong moment.
And his fist connected directly with my face.
It hurt way more than I expected. My lip split open almost immediately and I tasted blood right away. I just kind of stood there frozen for a second before I started crying because I genuinely couldn’t process what had happened.
And the weird part is that for a second it didn’t even feel accidental emotionally.
Because he fake punches around me so often, seeing him swing near my face already felt normal before this happened. So when he actually hit me, my brain immediately went to “oh my god my boyfriend just punched me.”
He panicked instantly afterwards. Like genuinely panicked. He went pale, kept apologizing, tried cleaning the blood off my face with tissues, asked if I needed a hospital, and kept saying he didn’t see me step forward while he was mid-swing.
Honestly I do believe that he didn’t mean to do it.
But at the same time I can’t stop thinking about how weird it is that he mock-fights around me all the time to begin with. Like why are fake punches near my face such a normal thing in our relationship that this could even happen?
Now my lip is swollen, my face hurts, and he’s texting me paragraphs apologizing while I’m sitting here replaying the whole thing in my head.
Part of me feels dramatic because technically it was an accident.
But another part of me keeps thinking maybe pretending to throw punches around your girlfriend all the time isn’t actually normal.
I genuinely don’t know what to think anymore.