Search Results: boyfriend needs alone time

I love my dog. I love my boyfriend. But we are having some serious issues. My boyfriend and I have been together for three years, we have lived together for two, and recently we got a puppy. He's adorable and fairly well trained, but being a puppy he has a lot of energy. My boyfriend doesn't understand it because he's never lived with a dog (and I have lived with many) so he gets very frustrated. Sometimes he grabs him by the skin or pins him and screams at him, or holds his mouth closed until my puppy cries. Once I swear my boyfriend waited until he was out of the apartment and hit him, though he denies it and I can't prove it cause I didn't see it, I only heard a slap and my dog cry. My puppy starting to show a lot of symptoms of the treatment: he's wary of strangers petting him, he sometimes cowers, he sometimes pees when he's grabbed, and he challenges my boyfriend by barking at him and standing his ground. I even have this horrible feeling of dread leaving them alone now, because I never know how my pup will be treated when I'm not around...

I just need someone to tell me whether or not this is in my head, because my boyfriend says it is. He says it's normal for people to grab them by their skin and pin them as he does, but I feel like it's worse than that. Still, he talks it away and brushes it off his shoulder every time I try to talk to him. I've offered to take the puppy to classes to even better train him, but he refuses to come and be part of it (which is important in dog training, to have the owners who will be saying the commands present). I've bought him more toys to distract him, I take him on walks over an hour long so he'll be tired and it's less likely they'll bother each other. I just don't know what to do or if I really am blowing it out of proportion. I need to know if my dog is going to be okay.

Please let me know what you think.