Am I right in being bothered by this?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Actually, the point I was trying to make is that we shouldn’t construct relationships around this idea, and that relationships should be about looking out for and helping others. Yes, it is true that I am disappointed with the responses, and I’m sorry that I was unable to sympathize with them more. But it’s not because I’m trying hard to maintain my current perspective, or because I have difficulty admitting being wrong; if you sift through my past posts, you can find plenty examples of me admitting being wrong. In fact, there’s one from yesterday.

Anyway, the reason I’m not willing to get on board with the mainstream opinion here is because certain people on this thread seem to be suggesting that we adopt borderline antagonistic relationships with people where you never intervene or say anything when you can save them some trouble, because then you’re enabling their irresponsibility or something. To some degree, I understand it, especially when we’re talking about nagging-- but it appears to me that these people feel very fervently about this in all spheres and magnitudes (to me nagging is not the same as speaking up). I truly wonder if these same people would not be bothered if a close friend deliberately neglected to tell them something that cost them somehow. I don’t mean to make a mountain out of a molehill about a subway ticket, but at the same time, what harm does it do for you to say something if you notice-- especially to someone you know very well, and are very close to? I find it hard to believe that no one here who was in those shoes would question the psychology of the friend’s decision, and would instead just laugh it off. Even if you are able to admit your errors, could you feel completely comfortable about the behavior of a friend who, say, repeatedly stands by quietly as you mistakenly waste money or effort? Would it not at least cause you to question the nature of your friendship?

There is a very painful piece of my family’s history in which someone close to me ended up dead because someone else who knew certain information decided to not say anything, for reasons that they were never able to explain. Perhaps this unfortunate incident is in a different league, one much more serious, but I always think back to this story when I think about situations in which people not piping up at the critical moment can allow bad things to happen to others.

Anyway, I can accept on an intellectual level that I’m wrong, but honestly, I’m not sure if I feel it in my heart yet, except to say, like someone mentioned earlier, that the decision to say something in these situations might be right for me, but not necessarily for everyone else. That’s the best I can do for now.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughts, everyone, particularly to Manda JO and pbbth. Your words resonated with me more than anything else in this thread.

62

So you had the brain fart and it is her fault.
Nice.
You are making a far bigger deal out of this than is required.
In the first case it cost you a few minutes. As long as you got to point B before they closed, no harm, no foul.
In the BART case, so what if you bought a ticket you didn’t need. I assume that you can ride BART whenever so you are only out the time value of money for a couple of days, plus the 30 seconds it took you to buy the ticket. What that a nickel at today’s rate?
In both cases BFD.
You either need to learn to pay more attention, or learn to say DOH! :smack: more often. Or both.

63

You were wrong on #1; she was wrong on #2. It’s a wash and neither of them are worth the time it takes to rant in this thread. Give her a hug and a noogie and get on with yo bad selves.

64

I heard or read someplace that when two people have been in an intimate relationship for a while, they begin to, not quite but nearly literally, share a mind. They get to know one another, they learn one another’s strengths and weaknesses, and they unconsciously divvy up roles and responsibilities based on these unspoken understandings.

(The specific context in which I learned this was memory. One partner doesn’t need to remember Friend X’s birthday because they know the other partner knows it; but the first partner sort-of feels like they know it, even though they don’t really, because it’s a shared memory. Conversely, the other partner doesn’t need to remember the name and location of the dry-cleaning place, because they know the other partner knows it. And so on. This apparently is a contributor to the pain of breaking up a long-term relationship, because it feels, again not exactly but almost literally, like half your brain is suddenly gone.*)

I wonder if something like that isn’t going on in this situation. You have an expectation that some of your mental functioning is being offloaded to your partner. It’s a totally normal and natural consequence of being in a relationship. As you get to know one another, as each of you gets comfortable with the respective quirks of the other, you will find your thought processes becoming more and more linked. Your partner will recognize that you’ve gone off on autopilot, and interrupt you, and vice versa.

But the thing is, it doesn’t necessarily happen at the same rate for each person. You may be unconsciously offloading or sharing your mental burden more quickly than she’s picking up on it. This is nobody’s fault; it’s the inevitable result of two people negotiating their mental and emotional space in the abstract collective construct called a relationship.

One thing that’s missing from the thread, as far as I can tell, is any indication of how long you’ve known each other, and how long you’ve been seriously dating. If it’s six months, this kind of hiccup shouldn’t be surprising. If it’s six years, well, that’s different.

But short of that, honestly, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. The suggestion that it should be a big deal is a bigger deal than the deal itself, frankly.
*And I’m about to find out first-hand, since I’ve just concluded my own divorce. Yeesh.

65

You’re really fixated on making someone right and someone wrong in this scenario. Assuming that you were both acting with good intentions, you’re really, as people have pointed out, just dealing with two different personalities. It’s very possible, as someone said above, that she’s treating you how she’d like to be treated.

Your subject line asks if you’re right to be bothered by this. Right or wrong, you are bothered – but the person who can definitely make changes to deal with that is you. Maybe you need to calm down. Maybe you need to have a discussion with your girlfriend in which you say, “I’d really appreciate it if you spoke up when you saw me doing something like that. I won’t think of it as nagging.” Maybe you need to break up because she’s not going to change and it’s a really big deal for you. Maybe you need to learn to love a taciturn woman.

None of that makes one or the other of you right or wrong. It just makes you different.

(For the record, I’d probably not say anything about the driving, assuming that you knew what you were doing, but I’d speak up about the subway ticket, assuming you forgot. I can’t explain why.)

66

In my marriage, behavior like hers would be considered extremely passive aggressive. In other relationships, apparently not so much, judging by this thread. I think like you do, though, in that I really value the connections between people. What you may have, if you will pardon the cliche, is a failure to communicate. Talk to her calmly about this, and get back to us. I am eager to hear her perspective.

67

I hesitate to respond to posts like these because it seems apparent that the authors don’t understand what I mean when I say that it’s not about the specifics of this situation. It’s about what I should feel when someone close to me sees me making a mistake, acknowledges it, and for unknown reasons, fails to say anything-- especially when my actions are due to forgetfulness, and there’s no lesson I could possibly learn from making the mistake. Maybe I am horribly immature in feeling let down by it. What should I do?

68

This is an excellent point.

One or both of you may need to accept that the relationship you actually have will not perfectly match up with your ideal relationship. No one’s does, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that in the middle of one’s annoyances.

69

She told you she deliberately, “stood by idly and said nothing,” or just the part about recognizing your behavior was odd?

Sometimes you are so preoccupied that the reason a thing feels wrong doesn’t click until later. My ex once asked me to taste his tea because it just didn’t taste right. Salt. Blech! In hindsight we both realized I had been standing next to him when he reached into the cabinet, took out the salt canister and measured a heaping spoonful into his cup. I saw it and it never occurred to me to stop him. On the other hand, his brain recognized neither the initial action nor that the offending taste was salt, just that something was off.

70

She’s being passive aggressive and weird.

71

Why don’t you tell us what she said when you came to her with this?

'Cause in the end, it won’t matter one whit what we say. Only what you say and what she says.

72

She sounds pretty wretched to me. If you are walking towards the open manhole, and your mind is preoccupied, YES, EVERYBODY AND HIS DOG KNOWS YOU SHOULD BE WATCHING, BUT YOU AREN’T, well, tough for you, she thought you knew what you were doing! And that gun that she said wasn’t loaded, of course she thought that you *knew *that you should never take anybody’s word about whether or not a gun is loaded. I hope your car never breaks down on a below zero Farenheit evening…

I go with the previously mentioned passive-aggressive.
(To be fair, I have used this rationale in the past, and I lost out on some real babes. Of course, if they did that to me then, who knows what further wondrous torments they would have cooked up for my by now???)

I say this one won’t get any better. Scrape her off.
hh

73

Don’t feel too alone. I would feel pretty much as you do about these incidents, if they had happened to me, especially the second one. The only excuse I would find acceptable would be if she had truly zoned out and didn’t notice what you were doing. But since you say she did notice, then yeah, I’d say she was pretty callous.

If I saw Mr. Cee about to do something stupid, I’d warn him, because I love him, and I hate to see to see a person I love inconvenienced in even a minor way. Not because it is my “responsibility” to protect him from his mistakes, but because it is what I want to do. If it turns out I’m wrong, and what seems like a mistake is something he’s doing intentionally, then no harm done.

74

I would’ve spoken up about the ticket, but not the driving route. For the latter, I’d figure that you’d thought of something else and decided on another route/to make the stops out of order.

75

I find myself insanely curious to know exactly what she did say when you raised this. To be honest, her actions don’t seem like a big deal to me, but then again, I am not the one dating her.

I probably wouldn’t have said anything in either of those situations.

With the car, I would think that you had some deliberate route in mind for a reason, or more likely, I might half-notice that you were going an unusual way, but not really think on it too much in the first place because I’m not the one driving. But sure, after you pointed it out or it became completely obvious (when we’re zipping down the expressway), I would say that I knew you were going toward the expressway, and no, I didn’t say anything.

The ticket is trickier. I don’t know how your public transportation works, but around here, there are many times when I stop at the ticket machine to put additional money on my card even if I don’t need to right at that moment. Especially if it is the weekend, and I am thinking that it will save time to do it now, as opposed to during rush hour on my way to work. If you asked me why I didn’t say anything to you, my response would be “You knew it was free … so I thought you had some other reason to stop at the machine.”

I also see a WORLD OF DIFFERENCE between these situations and someone standing idly by while you walked into an open elevator shaft. Or reached for a Coke and mistakingly picked up a big can of rat poison. I know you’re trying to illustrate a general concept not tied to these specific incidents, but I do think that many people validly moderate their responses based on risk, and both of your examples were very low risk in the big picture.

I do think it’s very not nice if she noticed, and deliberately didn’t say anything so that she could have the joy of watching you mess up and then secretly laugh at you. But what was her motivation? If it was more along the lines of not wanting to make a mountain out of a very little molehill of a problem, then it’s more a matter of different communication styles and expectations.

76

It’s tough, walking that fine line between being helpful and being a nag. It reminds me of a moment I had with my husband recently:

Scenario: Dinner is cooking, I’ve realised I’m out of a vital ingredient (Head slap! Should have checked first!), I grab my jacket and my keys, ask Dear Husband to watch the pot on the stove and head for the door. He doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve spoken to him. Freeze on the doorstep. Do I:

a) Repeat myself, which will surely make him snap “I heard you the first time!” (thus proving that I nag)
or
b) Trust that - in the quiet of the house and in light of the fact that we’re the only two people in it, and that I’ve spoken loudly and clearly - he has heard, understood and will do as I asked.

I went with b). I got back from the store to find the pot boiled dry.

If I point out he’s doing something that I don’t think is right, he’ll either be mildly grateful or thoroughly annoyed and it’s really tough to make the call at times. I tend to err on the side of trusting that as an intelligent, capable adult he knows what he’s doing. He’s a sweet guy, but tends to be brusque and gets impatient rapidly and sometimes lacks the good manners to acknowledge people when they’re speaking (he says he heard me ask him to watch the pot but just forgot).

In all fairness, I get snappy when he points out that I’m doing something that I know full well I’m doing, or suggests I do something I was intending to do anyway. It makes me feel like he doesn’t think I’m smart/capable enough to manage it on my own. If I was driving somewhere and he started questioning the route I was taking, he’d be risking having me bite his head off if I was in a touchy mood. Likewise, your girlfriend may feel that you don’t respond well to helpful suggestions, or she may have known someone else who responded less than graciously and fallen into a habit of biting her tongue. Overall, I think you missed an opportunity to have a good laugh together at your absent-mindedness (something that DH and I can happily do when I’m not being short-tempered and he’s not feeling impatient).

77

Actually, the tone I’m generally hearing here is that you’re overreacting and that if you want her to help you avoid little slip-ups, you should ask her to do so. What you shouldn’t do is get all bent out of shape that she didn’t react like you expected her to. We all have to make adjustments in relationships, like learning whether or not our partner likes to be corrected for little things. The biggest part of those adjustments is actually talking to each other about what you do and don’t want.

78

Holy shit dude. How about some reading comprehension?

He’s not saying it’s her fault, he acknowledges the mistake was on his end. What he is annoyed about is that someone who professes to love and care for him watched him do what she knew to be the wrong thing, but decided for whatever reason not to say anything to him. Now, in this case, it cost him a few drops of gas (but it’s expensive now!) and a few dollars on subway fare. He’s hoping that in the future it won’t mean that he walks into an open manhole or tries to mix chlorine and ammonia instead of chlorine and water.

This morning, my wife kissed me goodbye and didn’t say anything about the fact that I had not combed my hair, so I went to work with my hair looking pretty wild. I was mildly annoyed (I can only see myself when I look in the mirror, she sees me as I’m walking around the house, and I look pretty silly with wild hair) but then I realized that she was also preoccupied and probably noticed something was off but it didn’t click. So I’m not annoyed anymore. But when I wasm I don’t blame her for my forgetfulness, I was annoyed that (I thought) she saw me looking really silly and decided not to say anything. I am a very good-natured and sometimes forgetful person. I would never get mad if my wife said something like “Comb your hair” or even “Are you leaving the house looking like that?”

The folks in this thread that seem to be getting all twisted up, saying he expects his SO to be his mommy, etc are dumbfounding. He’s just looking for someone to have his back a little when he makes a mistake. IS that so wrong?

79

Sorry, I missed the second page of the thread with my prior response. I think this is probably at the heart of the whole matter, and has a lot to do with why you feel so strongly about the situation. In short, it’s baggage. We all have it, and if we’re lucky it fits in the overhead compartment (I’m still working on that goal myself). I think the best thing you could do is tell her about that incident and explain that it’s part of why her not saying anything bothered you so much. I suspect it will do both of you a lot of good in the long run.

80

It’s not wrong at all. What is wrong is him expecting her to know that that is what he wants, because it isn’t so universal as to be assumed. What’s wrong is him assuming she was working out of the worst possible motives. And what’s most wrong is him not talking to her about it.