This is a thing that happened to me a few years ago. My wife and I had been married and living in a new place for a few months. The walls were pretty thin in our new apartment and we could hear things in the other apartments. Not really all that bad because they were all fairly quiet but it sets us up for what happened.

When the holidays came around things got stressful. We were on the hook for a lot of contributions to both of our families. It wasn't anything we couldn't handle, it was just a lot of work. As often happens when stress begins to take its toll, we fought quite a bit. Nothing too major, yelling matches and the occasional door slamming. At one point, when we were having a screaming fight over regular pumpkin pie or chiffon, one of our neighbors called the cops and said they thought there might be some domestic violence.

The police that responded were a man and a woman. I was terrified that I'd be taken to jail without question. They separated us, the man talked to me outside while the woman spoke to my wife inside. The very first questions the officer asked me were "Are you alright?" "Was there any physical confrontation?" and then when I said no he asked "Are you sure she didn't hit you? It's okay to tell me if she did."

I was shocked. Not only was I presumed innocent, the officer treated me as a potential victim. To round out the story, the woman officer and my wife came outside and the two officers exchanged stories. She had asked my wife the same questions posed to me. It looked exactly like they had been trained to do it that way, to make no assumptions and treat both parties as though they were a potential victim. It was doubly reassuring that my wife's story matched mine in every detail. The two officers talked to us together about the fight, offered sympathy about the stress of the holidays and then left. We ended up skipping the pumpkin chiffon pies and just making regular ones.

My wife and I haven't really fought like that since, choosing instead to follow the advice of the police and step away if we start to get angry. This way of handling a potential DV situation was definitely a new thing, and I thought I'd share that there are some police out there who are starting to get it.