I’m going to respectfully disagree with you about the sore loser thing. I really didn’t care one way or the other about the outcome of any of the games, and my reaction to losing was “dang it” at most. I think there is definitely something to “the last straw” feeling, which for me comes from getting ignored when I approach a hurt feelings situation calmly.

I’m aware that I’m a much more sensitive person than most, and I definitely need to work on that and do better at keeping perspective when I get upset. Staying calm when I feel hurt is not an easy thing for me to do, my brain goes into fight/flight really easily, and I’ve been actively working on strategies that help me get through to the calm side of things before I react at all. Most of the time those strategies work and we don’t have issues.

I’ve communicated to my husband that the thing I need most from him in situations like this one is for him to validate my feelings even if he thinks it’s something trivial. I know he wasn’t laughing maliciously or actively trying to hurt my feelings. But intent and impact don’t always match, and my feelings were hurt anyway. Most people probably wouldn’t care, but emotions are subjective. My husband doesn’t like to apologize if he hasn’t done anything that’s objectively/technically wrong or purposefully hurtful. My view is that if you’d apologize to someone after accidentally hurting them physically, you should apologize after accidentally hurting them emotionally too.

We’ve agreed in the past that as long as I talk to him about my feelings calmly from the start, he won’t trivialize or ignore what I’m saying/how I’m feeling. That didn’t happen this time around, or it didn’t happen quickly and I was impatient, so I overreacted. The overreaction stemmed from the feeling of being ignored, not from the laughing itself.