My husband has been accused of making a pass at my cousin's 17-year-old daughter
MY cousin's daughter has accused my husband of making some sort of pass at her at a family barbecue. It all came out of the blue after we had left the party, and my husband is shocked and upset by being accused. My cousin's daughter is only 17, and we're in our 40's
He admits he was drunk but says he has no memory of doing anything or saying something inappropriate. Nothing like this has ever happened before, although he drinks a lot and it is becoming a bit of a problem.
My cousin's daughter won't say exactly what happened and as far as we can tell, nobody else saw or heard anything either. It has put a big strain on my relationship with my cousin, and I don't know what we can do about it.
'Marks response'
Unfortunately, we now live in an age where you can easily offend someone and not even know you've done it. Gone are the days when people had a sense of humour or could take it for what it worth. No; these days, people get offended by the smallest of things and can even be offended by the situation's tone. I even read the other day that someone had been fired from their teaching job because they had miss gendered one of their students, and that person had made an official complaint about how it made them feel...Did you realise what kind of world this is turning into?
There have been many times that I've had to say sorry or explain myself to someone because they misinterpreted what I was saying, or they just got upset because they felt I hadn't taken their feelings into account. I actually lost contact with a close friend recently because he was upset by what I had said to him and therefore didn't speak to me for six months. It was only when we started talking again that he told me he hadn't spoken to me for the last six months because he was upset by what I had said to him. I had to be honest with him and explain that I had no clue what he was talking about, and I thought he had just been swamped and hadn't had time to make contact with me!
You see, some people don't see things the way other people do, and therefore they're oblivious that person may have taken what was said out of context. Now I'm not saying your husband didn't make a pass or say something inappropriate to your cousin's daughter, but it is possible that the mind of a 17-year-old could take something that a 40-year-old had said and interpret it in some other way than it was meant to be.
Your husband has said he has no recollection of doing or saying anything, and you need to ask yourself, do you know him and trust what he's saying? The best thing to do for this situation to calm down is to have your husband apologise and then maybe keep off the drink when it comes to social events. If it's affected him the way you say it has, he will probably be more than happy to do this, as not to get himself into the same scenario again.