Struggling to Understand My Partner's Anger

you should generally stop and ask why they wanted you to stop in this situation, yes. (situations where it might not apply would be ones that are dangerous and where action needs to be taken immediately.) he might have wanted to make sure there wasn't something mixed in with what you saw as "mess" that he wanted to keep, or may have wanted to participate in the cleaning. or maybe there are other circumstances that i can't know from just your post. either way, when people ask you to do something (or not do something) and you ignore them, that's disrespectful to them. it doesn't matter whether you cleaning the table is wrong, it matters that you didn't hear him out.