And i bet when you were cooking a thanksgiving turkey, you wouldn’t have tolerated him for an instant standing over you, criticizing everything, quibbling over how he was sure he could do it better.
Sounds like you were out of line, and wouldn’t let him do something, something often done by men, and that he had the confidence to do. Poor man had to stand there hearing you basically saying “i have no confidence in you, and you are stupid”.
And he basically said, “i will not have some woman who tells me,,,, when she carries weapons”. If he substituted the word “person” would you feel better? Thats so petty, and it’s just as likely that pettiness was the root of the argument.
Actually we cooked together quite well. He would do the roast or the turkey and I would do the salad, mashed potatoes, desert, home made cranberry sauce etc.
Part of our problem was that as the oldest child by 8 years, my father treated me like a boy and had me helping repair the car outdoors in the middle of winter in NJ at the age of 5.
At the age of 5 his mother slapped him silly for an hour because his fingers were too awkward to tie his shoelaces. Subsequently both his parents used to say, “If you’d been a girl we would have called you Grace.” So he lacked both confidence and skills. I often tried to be diplomatic, but when he was about to ruin building materials I had paid for I was not about to let it happen.
He did respect my nerve. One night he phoned and said he had been at a meeting where threats had been made. He asked me to sit in the dark with a pistol in my lap at the window viewing the front door while he came home, which I did.