This is a large umbrella, not one of those that fits in a pocket.
Many a time, women too.
Yes, the offenderati do seem to be gathering.
That’s a very silly comment. Evaluating other people is a key life skill. This woman seemed to consider me a threat. I can respect that but I don’t have to like it.
Sorry, but even sharing a large umbrella is still awkward. I’d prefer to wait it out rather than have to share.
“Would you like to share my umbrella?” gives off creepy euphemism vibes. :dubious:
Say, is that an umbrella in your pocket?
mmm
Really?
I see it as something nice and all that is required is a polite no thank you.
Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but this seems overly hostile to me. It invites such shitty answers as “Scare them intentionally” or “shame them for being rude.”
Now, I wouldn’t do those things. I know how anxiety works. But I also realize that it makes me focus more on myself, and can result in me seeming rude. And I can’t very well expect others to respect my anxiety while saying that their feelings are invalid.
Yeah, OP. It sucks that she took your magnanimous gesture as a scary thing. But a fear reaction is an automatic one. It’s not something you can actually control.
And while, ideally, she could assertively say “No, but thanks!” (as showing fear can make you seem vulnerable) there are plenty of reasons she might not. This is a woman walking alone in the rain in a big city. She’s probably heard many stories. Heck, she may have been a victim herself before, or know someone who has.
In other words, don’t take it personally. Yeah, it is sad that she responded that way, but that sadness has nothing to do with her or you. It has to do with how shitty the world is that there are horrible strangers out there.
Don’t let it get to you. Use it as a learning experience. Learn from the people here who offer better advice than I can. If they seem upset at you, don’t take it personally, either. They’re just upset at being told that they shouldn’t be scared, and, I assume, took your post the wrong way.
They still have stuff to offer.
That’s the thing, though. As a woman, when a strange man offers me something like an umbrella or to buy me a drink, it’s not that initial action that makes some of us nervous, it’s what happens when we decline. That’s when things turn nasty. That’s when we hear “your loss” and “I was doing you a favour, you fat, ugly bitch” and “stuck up, fat, ugly bitch”. It’s almost always “something, something, fat, ugly bitch”.
If we’re super sweet and nice about turning it down, they keep bugging us “oh, come on, are you sure?” and if we’re firm about it, we’re “fat, ugly bitches”.
Sometimes you just can’t win.
So you might be a perfectly nice guy doing something that seems nice but my internal dialogue is going “shit, how do I deal with this? Is this guy going to turn into a huge jerk if I decline?”.
It really is overly hostile. It wasn’t horribly long ago that offering to share an umbrella in those circumstances wasn’t just welcome, it was expected. If Quartz had NOT offered to share his umbrella, the woman would have been here pitting the inbred hick who didn’t have the common courtesy to share his umbrella while she sat there getting soaked.
Yeah, 'cause it’s all about you, and your not-scariness. But you don’t know, and apparently don’t care, how she felt. Consider her properly: she felt fear. I don’t know why you’re dismissing that. You don’t know what brought her to that feeling. You don’t know that it was irrational. You only know that you weren’t a threat. And oh my god it spoiled your walk.
Which bit of ‘I don’t have to like it’ are you failing to understand?
I do care. That she seemed to feel scared from my offer saddens me.
Or maybe she’s just paranoid and weird. Either way, who cares? If she’d rather get soaking wet than take the chance that the guy offering her an umbrella in public in broad daylight isn’t a cut-throat rapist, that’s her look-out. Why give a shit what one weirdo thinks?
'Twas meant semi-jokingly.
If the OP had been a teenaged boy circa 1966 offering to share his umbrella with a teenaged girl, it might’ve been “something nice”.
Instead we have a middle-aged man in 2016 making the offer to a female stranger, and the soundtrack sounds more like this.
Like it or not, offering to share an umbrella with a woman isn’t a neutral gesture of help. Do an image search on “sharing an umbrella”, and almost every picture is a variant on this: there are built-in connotations of chivalry, romance, and the meet cute. And maybe, just maybe, on a wet shitty day she isn’t in the mood for having to explain that that no, she isn’t in the mood for that Hepburn and Tracy stuff today, and would rather just get wet than risk having to rebuff another awkward advance. Her choice, respect it.
Apparently Quartz does, since he’s put so much emotional investment into the whole thing.
Or possibly, her reaction had nothing to do with you at all? When my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the world didn’t stop. So that very same day, as I was trying to process the information, I had to go shopping. Somewhere along the cheese aisle, the impending finality of it all really hit me. And as such, I just kind of stood there, dumbfounded, staring at Gouda or whatever. In comes this guy who apparently wanted some, but I was in the way. I never heard him ask me to me, and when he requested it again louder, I burst into tears and took off. He looked absolutely stunned (and rightly so), and couldn’t gone home, got online, and wrote about some crazy bitch in Walmart who lost her shit because she was blocking products and he very innocently tried to get around.
So yeah. Sometimes it’s about them and not even a second thought has been given to you. Her grandmother might’ve just died and you awoke her from her sadness. Perhaps she’d lost her job and she was trying to figure out how to keep the lights on. Or maybe she was fantasizing about Hugh Jackman and then hooking up once she hit the lotto, and you intruding on her thoughts shattered her illusion and pissed her off. Who knows? But the takeaway here is it wasn’t about you regardless.
Interesting perspective. I can’t honestly say I believe it’s in general fully justified, but I’m not walking in your particular shoes either. As long as a man isn’t automatically labelled ‘MRA’ for saying the same thing ‘sometimes you just can’t win’, wrt to today’s FUBAR’ed gender relations, it’s fine.
None of us knows the history of this woman. She could have had a really bad experience in a similar situation.
A situation happened years ago when I went to drive home after work and discovered that I had a dead battery. I saw a woman across the street who was wearing a T-shirt of the company I worked for. She was getting into her car. I approached her and said, “A friendly face in a <company X> T-shirt! My battery is dead - would you mind giving me a jump?” She gave me a worried look and mumbled a polite decline. I then said, “Do you know where <employee Y> lives? I think it’s around here somewhere.” The woman looked at me with surprise and said, “Oh! You really are. . . Oh!”
It turned out she was <employee Y’s> partner. I learned later that this woman had once been attacked by a man under similar circumstances. I had inadvertently scared her. I felt really terrible about it, and conveyed my apologies to her through <employee Y>.
If I were in the OP’s position I’d have apologized on the spot, even if I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. Something simple like, “I’m terribly sorry - I didn’t mean to scare you.”
You’re massively over-stating the issue. I felt sad enough about it to start a thread here. Don’t read into it more than that.
Quartz, I think you may have gone wrong with your thread title. My take on the actual text of your OP is that you felt sorry for the woman, and that you considered it sad that there are enough bad men in the world that she would feel frightened of you, someone who sincerely just wanted to assist her.
However, the thread title does leave room for an alternate interpretation: that you are sad because a man-hater spoiled your walk with her ungrateful behavior. It looks to me like several posters have taken your OP this way.
I’m not familiar enough with you as a poster to have a good idea of whether you’re more likely to feel sorry for the frightened woman or for yourself in such a situation, although I would hope it’s the former.
During a cloudburst I noticed a woman with beautiful Italian leather shoes. I ran up to her and mentioned that I had rubbers in my briefcase. She chose to make a run for home.