I can understand your needing to meet your deadline.

All I know is for me, I would need to settle whatever is going on with my partner. The longer it is held back, the worse it gets. Powder keg comes to mind.

I would play reversies here. How would you feel if your partner would not talk to you, when you had something eating on you? Myself, either way would be a rhinoserous in the room. I NEED to get things out or it makes me sick.

To put volunteer time before me would hurt me. It would be saying to me everything else is more important to my partner than I am.

Anyway this is how I felt when I read your share!

Thank you for being here. love,debilyn

The way I understand this, he wants to sort out some papers with you, which he has decided he wants to do just now -- it's not that you agreed together to do it at this time.  You reply that you have some commitments already and so you don't have time now, and you'll have to put it off.  He is so upset that you won't change your plans (I could say "at his demand") that he is like a "simmering volcano."

I read once that all relationship problems are caused by an inability to negotiate conflict, and I can believe it.  Ideally two people will participate in negotiating conflict.  You're saying, "What's my part in it?", which is very helpful.  I don't know what the priorities in your life or relationship are, so it's hard to say whether you should put aside your plans to do something that he feels needs doing now.  Ideally it seems to me that both sides should be able to have some flexibility about the issue.

But reacting like a "simmering volcano" is not a very constructive approach to disappointment, the way I see it.  A relationship of walking on eggshells is stressful.  When I've known people like this in the past, they would be angry and rejecting as a way to punish and provoke me.  And of course being me, I'd lash out at them.  Then it spiralled downhill, as you might predict.  I wish I'd known the Al-Anon saying "Don't React" then.

Whatever the "right answer" about what you should have chosen to do (I doubt if there is one and only one "right answer" -- there rarely is), the situation now sounds pretty stressful.  When other people are sunk into dysfunction, it's even more important that we practice our recovery as hard as we can.  Take care of your own serenity.  That's how I see it.