You’re at the airport with your beautiful wife and young child, scheduled to fly, as you have often before, across country to visit relatives for a holiday. Just before it’s time to start boarding, your wife comes to you in tears and begs you not to make the family get on the plane. Always an emotionally balanced and rational creature, she is crying because she is overcome with dread. She freely admits how unlike her, this is, and how ridiculous she must surely sound. Still she begs you.
Other, because I would be the one dreading the flight. This is a given, as I dread all flights, and would have previously persuaded her that the holiday should be accomplished via road trip.
I assume that she’s somehow predicted the future and knows that the plane will crash or something. So I listen to her and we don’t board. If it is something else, like she’s suddenly having a breakdown or something, still don’t board.
Of course I’m a lady and it would be the other way around for me, but I always listen to my boyfriend. He’s always level headed, sincere, and doesn’t have mood swings like me. If he were to act this way, I’d know something was wrong.
Clearly, there’s something very wrong with my normally sane wife. Could be mental, physical, or both. But whatever’s wrong, it’s not going to help if I try to force her to overcome her terror, or worse, leave her to cope with it alone. We’d head home, and then schedule some doctor’s appointments for her. Since we’re not going on vacation now, we’ve got plenty of time for them.
You can’t pick wrong. If you get on the plane and it crashes, you might hear “I told you so” on the way down, but it will all be over soon enough. If you get on the plane and it doesn’t crash, you were right not to humor her paranoia. If you don’t get on the plane and it crashes, you’re alive and you right to listen to her instincts. If you don’t get on the plane and it doesn’t crash, you’re a good husband who just got out of a crappy trip.
I’d try to talk her down, using specific Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques that I have used in the past to talk to people with irrational fears. I’ve even talked with someone who had a lot of anxiety around flying, although not at the moment she was about to get on the plane. I would definitely not use anger, which would be ineffective in this situation.
If I was unable to talk her out of her fears enough to get on the plane, then we probably wouldn’t be going – although depending on the circumstances and how much I was looking forward to the trip, I might go by myself.
Overcome with dread as in she had some kind of vision? I’d try to talk her down, but inwardly I’d be scoffing. The best way to prove that nothing’s going to happen is to force her to get on the plane and say “I told you so” when it lands. No, that’s not just to be a dick on purpose, it to expose her flimsy feeling of “dread” as nothing so that in the future, she’d be more rational about it
I don’t believe in premonitions, generally speaking, but there are a number of things that could make a normally calm, rational person with no history of fearing airplanes suddenly break down about it. It could be a crapton of stress (perhaps involving the upcoming trip) suddenly coming out in the form of an anxiety attack. It could be a heart attack - often one of the first symptoms is an overwhelming feeling that something is about to go dreadfully wrong. If my spouse who’s never been afraid of airplanes is out-of-his-mind terrified for no apparent reason, I’m going to treat it as a serious medical event (psychological or physical) and not board the plane. Okay, and I am a bit superstitious. I blame all the bad movies.
It’s interesting how many people are accepting without question that the wife has to ask not to get on the plane and the husband gets the final decision and can make her if he so decides.
For me, the situation would be less about the actual fear of the plane and more about the fact that a normally rational, well-grounded person was becoming hysterical and acting completely out of character. I’d be very concerned about some kind of psychiatric or mental problem and we’d be leaving the airport and going to the doctor or possibly the ER, depending on how worked up she was.
Also, I know it’s irrational, but I’m agnostic on the idea of gut feelings and premonitions and part of my brain would have a niggling wonder that if someone who is never prone to these sorts of things is absolutely convinced something terrible is going to happen, there might be something to it. I know it sounds stupid, but there it is.
Yep, I’m seeking medical attention if my husband started acting like this. Also seeking medical attention would kick in the trip cancellation insurance and I’d get the otherwise sunk cost of the flights back.
This might be a different answer if I was about to fly to Hawaii for a week though
Based on her previous track record of being rational and emotionally balanced, I’m sure as hell not forcing her to get on the plane- is that how I want to reward rational behaviour?
