We have been married three years. We met four years before that, so I know him well — or as well as you can know someone, which is partially but not completely. He is a good person with specific flaws. He can be impatient with processes that he doesn’t understand the point of, which sometimes includes my emotional processes. He can retreat into problem-solving mode when what I need is just to feel heard. He does both of these less now than he did in the first year we were married, because we have talked about it, imperfectly and more than once.
During the dress situation, he was, on balance, the right version of himself. He did not make it worse. He did not offer to call my mother and tell her what he thought of her, even though I could tell he wanted to. He did not treat my upset as a problem to be solved immediately, when what I needed was for it to be witnessed. He said ‘okay’ the right number of times and in the right way.
There was one moment where he got it slightly wrong: about a week after I got the dress back, he said something like, ‘At some point you’re going to have to decide whether this is the thing that changes your relationship with your mother or not.’ Which was true, and which was also not something I needed to hear at that particular moment. I told him that. He apologized. We moved on.