Jerry! Jerry! Jerry

Here is an idea. Don't bring your personal whacked out domestic fights to other people's birthday parties.
It's a problem for me on many levels. Not the least of which is this, I don't handle confrontations outside the workplace well at all. I get very nervous, and emotional - the point where I want to climb the walls and scream. I come from a family that doesn't fight. No confrontation is how we rolled. So I don't do it well, and I don't handle YOU doing it in front of me well. At all.
Our small birthday party was fine except for friend A who arrived out of sorts in a fight with his wife. Well thats fine, people fight.......but.....then SHE arrived and brought an entourage with her.
To my birthday party.

That's right. So now we've got a table of HER friends all glaring at our end of the table, as though it's somehow wrong for us to be there. At MY birthday party. And then the stilted, bullshit sweet conversation directed at me........as she glares at her husband. Why are they fighting? I have no idea...I have no idea why she chose to come. Our end of the table begins to mumble to itself a collective "Oh FUCK" because the tension between the two of them is like electricity.
My nerves immediately took a tumble. The shots I did to chill them out didn't help, so my end of the table began to formulate an exit strategy. We wanted to leave, but our friend, the husband of the fight, wanted to come.
This was clearly going to be an issue.
In what turned into a Jerry Springeresque scene of unreality, we left - the husband says he's coming. We went outside and waited. He kept not showing up. We tried to decide if he had been waylaid, should we get involved or just move on. I had to use the restroom finally so I said F it and went back in. Husband is paying his tab........is very mumbly about his intentions, wants to know where we're going. Frankly I wasn't driving but I was so completely buzzkilled I just wanted to go home. I left again and said goodbye to Sarah outside. Then we discuss where we are going, what we are doing etc and we see the wife scanning the parking lot, looking around. Clearly looking for us.
We are freaking out - why is she following us? WTF? We actually CONSIDERED hiding - I don't know why, I think it was a fight or flight instinct I swear. She finally corners us and wants to know where we're going all sweety sweety. I swear it was FREAKING ME OUT because she was so intense with the fake sweetness. I was just saying I wanted to go home (I freaking did want to go home, I was DONE) and Leslie is saying "get in the truck, just get in the truck).
As we got into the truck another friend showed up in the parking lot and the lot of us decided to escape together......as husband and wife were apparently going to converse in the parking lot.

So we went to another bar where I consumed a huge amount of alcohol in an unsuccessful attemp to destress.

I have spent today hung over and still completely stressed out by the whole thing.

I have an anniversary coming up in December. I should invite them over and see how they ruin THAT day.