I’ve noticed this behaviour in older people a lot more than with my peers.

But to be fair, they grew up with parents from a generation where divorce was illegal, rape was excused an disabled people used as guinea pigs. They did not come from a great situation

Last week I bought my wife flowers, just as a nice thing for when she got off work on a Tuesday. Sat down on the bus and the lady across from me leans over and says: You shouldn’t’ve bothered.
Three…THREE other ladies nodded and mmhmmm’d.

It really pissed me off that the assumption was that I’d fucked up and made her mad somehow and was trying to smooth it over with flowers.

My partner definitely does this a lot. We’ll be having a good time and randomly she gets upset, usually because something in her environment reminds her of something she is/was unhappy about. Then starts bringing up unrelated things from the distant past that also make her upset, seemingly just to continue the cycle. This often just gets projected onto me and she gets extremely impatient with me or raises her voice, even if what she’s mad about has nothing to do with me.

I thought this had more to do with her mental illnesses than anything. The fact that this is such a stereotype, though, makes me think we’re failing our young girls by socializing them to be psychic vampires, similar to how we socialize young men to be aggressive.