I have to agree. 
I understand being worried, but thinking about calling hospitals and whatnot after several hours is a wee extreme. My philosophy usually is that no news is good news: if something terrible has happened, you’re bound to be contacted sooner rather than later. The other person not picking up usually means their cellphone is on vibrate and in their bag, and they’re asleep or drunk or in a place too loud to hear their cellphone. God knows, I do it all the time.
Just wanted to get a clarification on this:
So you talked to him at 1:00? I get the impression from what others have said that they thought you were expecting him home then.
I think you overreacted, but I can’t blame you for being worried. As I see it, there was just a lack of understanding of the word “soon.” Here’s my interpretation, tell me what you all think:
The OP called at 1:00, the BF had a good buzz going and he and his friends were into, in the words of Beck, “a serious THING.” For this reason “soon” to him was open ended, while she took it literally. I’ve been in the same situation with girlfriends, relatives, classmates–hell, it’s just something I figure younger people do (if you don’t mind my asking, Zsofia, how old are the two of you?). I’m thinking he was focused on the game, and perhaps the OP was a little crabby 'cause she was tired.
And things proceeded from there. He kept doing what he was doing, she went to bed. A couple hours later, she woke up and wondered where he was, so she called him. She couldn’t get a hold of him, so she got worried. A little TOO worried, maybe, but I’m willing to bet that’s because she was a bit disoriented from waking up suddenly. To relate from experience, I’ve woken up suddenly early in the morning on the weekend and wondering if I was supposed to go into work that day even though I’d left my job 4 months before and was at grad school 800 miles away. Even after assessing the situation, I still paced around trying to make sure there wasn’t something I was forgetting. Shit like that throws somebody off, am I right?
This thread wouldn’t exist if he’d answered the first time. I do get the impression that he shut his phone off after the first couple of calls, but I attribute that to the game and being absent minded from the alcohol rather than a reflection on the OP.
So, coupla questions: Have you ever rang him repeatedly and not gotten an answer, Zsofia? Also, how have you communicated to him that you don’t like it when he doesn’t call ahead of time?
For everyone else, why is it unreasonable to get worried given the time of night?
You cannot make anyone worry about you. Ever. You may behave irresponsibly, but by no means are they required to be frantic and upset by it.
The OP’s boyfreind was inconsiderate, and I don’t blame her for her fear of fiery roadside death; I imagine the initial reaction is/was visceral and instinctive, coming from a deep-seated part of her personality. However the mixed reaction to the OP is itself evidence that such an assumption is not some sort of universal human impulse, and that of course he should know better. Bollocks.
The OP made a deliberate choice to terrify herself by going beyond her initial fear and obsess over highly unlikely scenarios. Two minutes’ thinking would have told her that there are hundred scenarios more plausible than him being dead. (Cellphone lost/destroyed/turned off/battery dead, BF drunk or asleep, BF picked up for DUI driving home, etc.)
ISTM there’s room for both sides to improve here; but were I the OP’s BF and her attitude was that I was under some sort of perpetual obligation to be in touch 24/7, I’d tell her to go ahead and lose my number.
Fuck you. Who said the two are mutually exclusive? Supposing that the BF received the first incoming call and ignored it, then yes, he’s a selfish ass. But for the OP to do any more than call, leave a message and wait to hear back is clingy. To call repeatedly for an hour and a half, contemplate scouring the city morgues for his charred corpse, look up his business phone online, and then posting the details of the story less then 16 minutes after it was all over is beyond clingy. It borders on pathological.
Maybe you should give people a break, assume they’re not doing it with the intent of causing you grief… 
Nah, not a misogynist, just a realist (and who says it was ever just for men?). Besides, everyone knows that real women play Axis and Allies with their boyfriends.
If shit happens and you are contrite “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you. I thought you’d be asleep and my cell was in my coat pocket” (or even "and I got too drunk to answer my phone). I’d say “oh, OK.” That’s not pulling shit, that’s two people with crossed wires - me being anxious because things didn’t happen as I expected and jumped to the scary (and improbable) set of explainations, you being considerate assuming I’m asleep and recognizing I was worried when I woke and you weren’t there. No big.
If I say “I was worried about you last night, I thought you’d be in around one and woke up and you weren’t here. I tried calling your cell and you didn’t answer,” and your response is more along the lines of “I don’t wear a leash” your toothbrush would be in a ziplock bag and I’d be shopping for Oreos to console me for spending time with a jerk.
I’d like to know the answer to this as well, because I worry if its 3am and Brainiac4 is still out. I want to make sure my level of worry is to Dope standards.
Granted, at 3am I worry that he is going to regret it in the morning and that I’m going to get stuck with the kids while he sleeps until noon. But somewhere in there I start worrying about hospital trips - and I need to know when its ok to call his cell (or his buddy’s home) and make sure he isn’t dead in a ditch without sounding “clingy.”
When someone isn’t home two and a half hours after they said they would be and can’t be reached by phone and you know they’re at a friend’s place playing a board game well known to take many hours to complete then yes, that is worrying excessively. I freely grant that the bf should have said, “I don’t know when I’ll be home. After the game’s over. I don’t know when that will be. Don’t wait up,” rather than saying he’d be home “soon.” But the only sense in which it was reasonable to worry about him being dead was with regards to having his entire armored forces encircled and cut off on the Eastern Front. It’s not at all the same situation as if he’d called from a bar at 1am, said he’d be home soon, and then didn’t arrive for several hours.
Talk about “not having enough information” in one post, but then you just know how the conversation would have played out in another post?
Well, I’m not surprised you think I’m focusing on the wrong issue, considering I think YOU are focusing on the wrong issue. We *don’t *know the whole story here, and what’s happening is that a large majority of posters rushed in to condemn the female half of the couple as clingy and characterize her as henpecking her partner, based on, in my opinion, their own projections onto the situation. And you think I’m being combative? :rolleyes: Check your own prejudices about this, Giraffe, and look at objectively if you can.
even when the phone call included the statement “we’re almost done”? Bullshit.
They were almost done. They finished within 6 hours of the call. 
Well, they started at, like, 4 or 5 in the afternoon! The thing was, they were almost done playing the game. He was up late drinking with them. Which was fine and I don’t care, I just expected him home by 2 or so. Sure, I overreacted - I mean, duh, calling hospitals would have been stupid (unless, of course, he’d been in one, and then it wouldn’t have been stupid at all.) And he wasn’t ducking my phone calls, and I’m very surprised and interested in all of you who are obviously transferring you own relationship crap onto mine. He was too drunk to notice it ringing.
In fact, one reason I called more than once is that his phone has been having issues and not always receiving calls. In fact, some times when I call it lets me into his voice mail (haven’t abused that yet!), or goes straight to voice mail (and then I call again because usually when it goes straight to voice mail it means it decided not to ring and next time I call it rings, so it’s not like he doesn’t have it on. I’ve seen it from the other end - the phone has issues.) So I wasn’t entirely sure it was even ringing all that time. But he wasn’ ignoring me, or not answering on purpose, he was bombed out drunk on the floor. He answered the business phone right away. I can’t believe you guys would assume he was ignoring my calls - what kind of relationship do you have where somebody calls that often in the middle of the night often enough that you just ignore it and don’t think something’s wrong?
And he always says “soon”, he doesn’t usually give a time estimate because he knows he’s kinda distractable. Unless he says “I’m leaving right now”, “soon” could be up to an hour on the high side. We have a perfectly healthy relationship, and he thinks you guys must have some issues.
To the OP: did you honestly think that your boyfriend was in need of rescue or body recovery, or did you think that he was still partying with his buddies? If the former, then I question the reasonableness of your supposition that he “might be dead.” If the latter, then you are making a tempest out of a teapot.
To the OP’s boyfriend: did you think that it was reasonable to promise your girlfriend that you would be home “soon” but then break your promise? If yes, then you are a dumbshit who does not deserve a girlfriend. If no, then you screwed up by not calling her, so you owe her an apology, and you should change your behavior in the future.
An important part of responsible remote wilderness canoeing is to provide those staying at home with a rescue plan. A normal part of this is to include extra days for bad weather, injury, etc., so that the rescue will not be attempted simply because one is overdue, and so that if one is seriously overdue, a rescue will be attempted on the expectation that rescue is indeed necessary. One has to consider the nature of the activity, the reasonable possibility of delay, and the reasonable length of such a delay. If the OP and her boyfriend are unable to come to an informal understanding as to what is reasonable in their daily comings and goings, then perhaps they should formalize rescue plans for most occasions, such as when one is partying with buddies – or, as I would suggest, both just stop being so immature.
Yeah, I’d probably say that, too.
Are there really so many guys out there who would prefer to stop answering their phones when their girlfriends call rather than a) have a talk about it or b) break up with their girlfriends? I’m a little stunned.
Hear, hear!
Are there really so many women out there that would rather drive the men out of their lives rather than give them the freedom to enjoy their personal time without repeated interruptions?
Amazingly enough, in my case, I have not driven my boyfriend out of my life. When he first got a cell phone, he was uncomfortable with how often I called him. And when he let me know, I cut it down. Oh my goodness! Communication actually works sometimes!
Then I moved out of the country and he wishes I called him more, so there you go.