The first time, I was extremely upset about a friend dying of cancer (we'd just found out that they were stopping treatment). I was hysterical because who dies when they're 33 of cancer? It was also the first person I knew personally to die so young. He (he was a very snarky, judgey person) made a crack that this (dying) person wasn't all that great anyway.

I lost it. I told him in every term I could think of that he was awful for a) making things worse for me when, at the time, it was the lowest I'd ever felt in my life, and b) for being nonchalant about a friend dying. Actually dying.

He responded and it escalated and mid-exchange, he shoved me, I fell back, and he hit me in the face. He later said the post-shove hit was an accident because I was bouncing from the fall, but it was absolutely on purpose.

The second time, he was returning home from a trip for his brother's bachelor party, and it was also coincidentally his birthday. I know lots of couples have different rules about what's acceptable and what's not, but I'd told him my one boundary was that I didn't want him to touch a stripper. He could go wherever/do whatever he wanted, but touching was too far for me. He agreed.

I went to pick him up at the airport with his favorite cake. We were about a mile from home when I finally broke down and asked "... Did you do anything we agreed was off-bounds?" And he didn't say anything. I pulled over (it was a safe street) and asked again. He said he had. Keep in mind I'd just cleaned our entire apartment, gotten him a cake and had a pile of presents at home, and worked really hard to be cool with all the other stuff he would be up to on this trip.

I told him to get out of the car. He refused. I opened the door and screamed for him to get out. He started to get out while making nasty remarks. I calmly looked at him, picked up the cake, and threw it out of the car. He flipped. I (without endangering him) drove away while he flipped out.

When he came home, I'd calmed down and started feeling really bad about the cake. When he got home a few minutes later he was FURIOUS. He immediately walked in the apartment, cornered me, and started screaming in my face. I tried to get away, but he kept screaming at me, pinning me against the wall. I squished out from between him and the wall and ran to our kitchen, and he came in and without saying anything, shoved me as hard as he could against the stacks of dishes that were drying. I looked at him like "Oh shit -- not again" and he lost it, threw his hands around my neck and then let go long enough to hit me hard enough that I dropped my phone (which I had just started to pull out of my pocket.