This might be one of the more oddly specific Am I The Asshole? Reddit threads that I have come across, but alas, I am drawn to share the story in honor of the colder months ahead…
u/ItsTooColdForThat starts the thread by explaining, “Yesterday I went ice skating with my girlfriend. Tuesday is one of her days for dinner, so she made chicken salad. When I saw the chicken salad, I admit I made a face. She was like, ‘What, what’s the problem?'”
“I said that we were outside in the cold all afternoon and I wasn’t really in the mood for cold food. She said we’re inside, the heat is set to 74° and we’re both wearing warm dry clothes, so it was plenty warm enough to eat salad. I said sure, but I just wanted something warm to heat me up on the inside. She said that was ridiculous, because my internal temperature is in the nineties and my insides are plenty hot,” he went on to explain.
“At this point, we were going in circles, so I said I was just going to heat up some soup and told her to go ahead and start eating, and I’d be back in a few minutes. When I came out of the kitchen with my soup, she was clearly upset, and she asked how I would feel if she refused to eat what I made tomorrow (which is today). I said I wouldn’t care, and she said that was BS, because ‘it’s rude to turn your nose up at something someone made for you.'”
Now he wants to know if he was an asshole for not wanting the cold salad his girlfriend made after being cold all day.
Here is what Reddit users are saying:
“You ARE an asshole. If you wanted something warm for dinner, you should have articulated that in advance. You can’t hold people accountable for expectations you’ve failed to set.”
“I eat loads of salad in summer, but very rarely in winter. And if I spent that day doing cold things, you can be sure I will be eating something warm. No one in my immediate surroundings is different. Salad after skating, for me, is WTF territory. Sometimes people are just surprisingly different and these situations will occur until you learn about eachother’s preferences.”
“You’re an asshole. She’s not a short-order cook. You could’ve just made the soup and had the salad. You were rude about it.”
“He felt cold and didn’t want to eat cold food. He made a soup for himself. Maybe he wasn’t elegant about how he did it and was a bit rude with the face, but he didn’t ask her to do anything else. So it shouldn’t be a big problem. He’s not a child. He has the choice of what he wants to eat.”
“I think if he’s never told her he won’t eat cold food on cold days, then he should have eaten the salad (I’m fine with him heating up soup to go with it), but don’t waste her effort. Then have a conversation about it so she doesn’t waste her time and effort in the future. It wouldn’t kill him to eat a salad on a cold day ONCE.”
“These are the things that come up in a relationship. We all have unspoken expectations that we’ve never thought to voice or known that other people feel differently about until those differing expectations meet head-on. I’m sure it never occurred to him that this was weird, and he assumed everyone liked warm food after spending the day in the cold outside. Likewise, it never occurred to her that some people even have that preference at all. Nobody is really at fault here, not for having different preferences or even for not thinking to voice them.”
So, now we open the conversation here. Drop your thoughts in the comments… After you answer the question below, because we need to know: