We all have situations in life that we are ashamed to remember later. Not only because we behaved in a somehow undignified manner - but simply because, mentally returning to this situation, we experience a strong feeling of shame. Or the desire to 'take it back' and do it differently.
Familiar feeling, isn't it? However, the heroine of our story today, told by the user u/ExitIcy9757, clearly doesn't belong to such people. Even having shown herself not to be the best in an unpleasant situation, the woman didn't seem to learn any life lessons for herself. However, let's read the story together and draw our own conclusions.
More info: Reddit
The author of the post has a fiancee and a 9-month-old baby and reminisces of a weird situation that happened to them some months ago
Image credits: Karolina Grabowska (not the actual photo)
One night the couple were walking down a suburban road with a stroller and the woman got frightened by some loud sounds
Image credits: ExitIcy9757
The man walked forward, found two teen hooligans hitting a car's windows with their bats, and chased them off
Image credits: Vitaliy Haiduk (not the actual photo)
Image credits: ExitIcy9757
However, turning back to his fiancee, he found out she fled rapidly, abandoning the baby, so he had to call her to bring her back
Image credits: Gustavo Fring (not the actual photo)
Image credits: ExitIcy9757
Several months later the man reminded his fiancee of this case in response to her bragging about her own incredible bravery - and got called a huge jerk in return
So, the Original Poster (OP) is a 25-year-old man, and his fiancee 'Jess' is a year younger. The couple also has a 9-month-old daughter, with whom they once, several months ago, returned home late in the evening. The family was walking along a suburban road, where they had walked many times, but at one point they heard loud, suspicious sounds.
The reaction of the man and woman was diametrically opposed. The guy moved forward with the baby’s stroller, saw two teenagers hitting the windows of a parked SUV with baseball bats, but wasn't afraid of the hooligans. Moreover, seeing an adult guy, they immediately decided to peel out.
Having dealt with the problem, our hero turned to his fiancee - and was surprised to find her several dozens of feet away, rapidly running away from the scene of the conflict. Jess was rushing so quickly and selfishly that she didn’t respond to the OP’s screams, and he had to call her to bring her back.
Well, the woman said that she simply mistook the baseball bat's hits for gunshots, but the fact that she literally abandoned her baby is well, you know, nobody's perfect... Just how surprised the OP was a few months later when, while watching a documentary in which someone fell into a stupor during an attack by predators, the woman belligerently declared that if she were in the place of the heroine of the film, she'd fight tooth and nail against the beast for her kid's life.
The man couldn't resist reminding Jess how, in a much less critical situation, she ran away from just two teenagers with baseball bats, literally abandoning the child. The woman responded by calling him a huge jerk and has simply given him the silent treatment since then. And now the author asks himself only one question - wasn't he a tad bit too harsh?
Image credits: William Fortunato (not the actual photo)
“On the one hand, of course, this woman didn't act very nicely, leaving her child in danger under the influence of stress,” says Irina Matveeva, a psychologist and certified NLP specialist, whom Bored Panda asked for a comment here. "And even had some audacity to brag of her own probable bravery to a person who witnessed her cowardice in a similar case."
“On the other hand, the man could also not ridicule the behavior of his fiancee, but simply express the same point of view, but somehow more delicately. In the end, it's pretty obvious that the mechanism for the occurrence of a stressful situation in her was approximately the same - only to avoid possible offense, I would recommend using more diplomatic expressions," Irina ponders.
People in the comments, however, mostly sided with the original poster, arguing that his girlfriend really didn't behave very nicely, in both of the described situations. “So she thought it was gunshots so her first instinct was to run which I understand but what I don't understand is how her motherly instincts went out the window and she left her child, that's crazy,” one of the commenters wrote.
Yes, commenters do believe that the issue here is purely one of instinct, and that the author generally did the right thing to note it. “It’s instinct to run. I’m imagining you pushing the stroller, but even more so [not the jerk] if she was. When we don’t have empathy for others we should be called out on that,” another person added. So have similar situations ever happened to you or someone you know? If yes, please feel free to share your own stories in the comments below this post.
People in the comments, however, mostly sided with the man, claiming that his fiancee abandoning her baby in a difficult situation was really cowardly
