Well, I think what you did wind up saying was right on the mark. The bartender backing you up seems to support that, too. I have no interest in my husband actually fighting some idiot for me, but not sitting idly by while some idiot in a bar insults me would be admirable. Also, there is a point where if no one speaks up to agree with her, it gives the impression that everyone is agreeing with him. That would definitely bother me.
There’s a difference between joining in the debate and offering points that happen to agree with your date, and telling someone not to speak to your date in a certain way. Good grief, there are worse things than being insulted by some random drunk in a bar. Any adult should be able to “defend” that. To act like a man (or anyone, for that matter) needs to step in and take care of you (the general you, not you in particular) is so lacking in self-confidence it’s pathetic.
This is a surprisingly complicated question, I’m finding. Yes, I expect my husband to “defend my honour,” like I would defend his, too, but I wouldn’t expect him to get beat up in a bar fight. If someone is acting nasty towards me, I would expect him to ask them to not talk to his wife like that (although it would be a race to see which of us would get to say it first - I have a mouth, too, and I’m not afraid to use it).
This situation in your OP was kinda stupid, SHAKES. You don’t start trouble back up five minutes later after the situation has settled down, and your ex-wife was in the wrong to not just say something herself or let it go. That said, I wouldn’t like someone talking to my husband like A-hole talked to your wife. Course, as others have said, you don’t get in fights with drunks in bars.
Complicated, man.
Um…I don’t expect anyone to DO it, but I would like to think that you would want to?
Does that make sense? If you had said in an undertone (to me), “that guy’s being a jerk, I oughta make him stop.” That would have been enough for me to say, “god, no he’s drunk jerk in a bar! Never mind him.”
I fully expect to fight my own (verbal) battles-I’ve only been physically threatened once by Mary Carl in the gym line sophomore year in HS–so it’s not that I want someone to be my protector. I’d just like to know that you wouldn’t mind doing it, if need be.* It’s not rational or even reasonable, but there it is.
*this would involve mind-reading. I know, I know…
This situation wasn’t your fault though.
I’m definitely of the opinion that I’ll stand up and fight for any of my friends if it comes down to it. But if somebody starts shit with somebody else, and it seems like she did it for the sole purpose of you speaking up, then hell no, they start it, it’s their bag.
Now, if the guy had started coming after her verbally just because she happened to be the next nearest target of drunken rambling, I’d say something, but the fact that she spoke up first…put it this way: you can’t defend somebody’s honor when they’re on the offensive.
Yeah, that sounds about right. The last thing I want is my husband all beat up, but I’d like to think that he would defend me if there was a pressing need.
I’m with featherlou. If someone was being offensive to me in a bar I would hope my SO would have a problem with it, so I’m with you so far. But I don’t like the double standard implicit in “a lady’s honor,” as if a woman is a delicate flower that is more in need of protection and who can’t take care of herself. I am unlikely to be in an escalating verbal confrontation in a bar, but if I am, I won’t expect the man I’m with to escalate it for me or to “finish it” for me. So my feelings are conflicted – yes, I’d want my man to be offended on my behalf but, no, I really wouldn’t want him to do anything about it. In fact, I probably wouldn’t let him do anything about it, and would be pissed if he got in a fight “on my behalf” against my wishes.
I had a BF in college who was a heavy partying drinker and probably an alcoholic of the “binge drinking” variety, not the “drunk every day” variety. He was a big guy, a total redneck, sweet as sugar when he was sober and always good to me. But his idea of a good time on a Friday night was to go down the bars, get completely wasted, and get in a fight. If I was out with him, I spent all my time babysitting him and threatening to leave his ass if he got in a fight. If he went out without me, I spent all my time wondering if he was okay or if I was going to get a call from jail or the hospital. One time he showed up at 3 in the morning with the perfect outline of the bottom of beer bottle in the center of his forehead (someone had slammed one into his head).
I like men – people, actually – who are self-confident and who can and will defend themselves and their loved ones if extremely provoked and basically given no other choice. I don’t like people who get into fights for less reason, and I don’t like people who expect others to do their fighting or defending for them. And I really don’t like girls (women) who expect their men to risk either getting hurt or hurting someone else, just so the girl will feel better.
There is no greater honor to be had than from brutalizing some drunk who steps to your woman in a bar. LOOK AT ME!! I’M A BIG MAN!!!
Seriously though, there’s nothing worse than someone who’s big mouth writes checks that they expect someone else to cash. I can just picture SHAKES’s ex-wife screaming “KICK HIS ASS!!! KICK DA MOTHERFUCKAS ASS!!!”
I think people who engage in fights are idiots. I’d only want someone to protect me if I were physically threatened, but unlike the idiot women in most movies and TV shows, I’d be beating on an attacker schmuck too - I wouldn’t leave it to the boys to sort it out.
I certainly would have no respect for a man who would respond to an idiot in a bar. The guy making cracks about the OPs wife was clearly a moron; no response was required whatsoever because his remarks were so contemptible.
The ex-wife was, apparently a big fan of cowboy movies or a throwback to a century or two ago. I expect a man to have intellect, wit, and the good sense to ignore morons. Any guy who thought ‘being a man’ equates to confronting jerks in bars would be out of my life pronto.
If someone is voicing stupidity and you don’t like it, you have two choices: Make the asshole stope talking (not recommended because, even if you’re successful, bloodshed is inevitable and the police will become curious) or you can leave. It’s unfortunate your wife didn’t understand that.
Defend her honor? No, her honor wasn’t impeached. He didn’t call her any names, did not directly threaten her or make remarks about her or suggest that she was morally deficient in any way. So no, you had no obligation to “defend her honor.” If she is directly approached, either in a threatening, compromising or sexually explicit manner, then you probably have an obligation to at least try to remove her from the situation; if you feel you could “take” the guy, then you would be permitted (though not expected) to actually deflect his advances toward her and use whatever physical action is necessary to discourage him.
But when there’s an argument in a bar that doesn’t concern your wife and she opens her mouth – pretty much, she’s on her own. And by waiting several minutes to address the issue, you lost your any credible motive to become involved.
Ladies…you can’t have it both ways. You can’t one minute be all like “you should have defended my honor!” and the next be all “STOP! Can’t you see he’s already dead!!”
I hate that shit.
What she said.
I think you’re misunderstanding us - I don’t want my husband to fight anyone else, I just want to know that he would be willing to. That’s not too much to ask, is it? 
You can count me with those who don’t think that’s a “defending her honor” type of situation. She was asking you to take sides in a confrontation that she got herself into. I don’t think any person should start a confrontation with the idea some innocent bystander will bail them out if it turns into a big huge thing.
I always remember one time one of my brother’s friends made some comment about me and then looked at my brother and said, “oh I guess I’m talking about your sister here,” and my brother laughed at him and said, “trust me, my sister can take care of herself.” That’s what I call defending my honor!
My honor isn’t something that needs defending. Nothing that another person can do will affect it. My honor is only affected by how I act. So getting into either an argument or a fight over something a loudmouth says in a bar is totally useless. It only shows that I’m willing and able to drop to their level.
If I’m threatened or manhandled, and I seem unable to get out of it myself, then I appreciate the backup of a friend or SO. But that has nothing to do with the genders involved.
One night over 7 years ago, me, my wife and a female friend were walking in Manhattan. It was about 11:30 pm and we were headed to a bar and the street we were walking down was pretty deserted. My wife is wearing a short skirt.
So I’m walking closest to the street, like a gentleman should and the friend is in between my and my wife. A kid going the opposite way is coming at us, he looks about 15. When he gets next to us, he, in one very quick and obviously practiced motion, kneels down and reaches up my wifes dress and runs his hands down her leg, then stands back and goes about ten steps down the street and he stops and looks back at us. We are all dumbfounded at what just happend, I’m looking at my wife to see what she thinks about this and I turn and looked at the kid. He is sitting there smiling at me.
Smiling at me.
I got very still, as I do just before I explode and suddenly the friend is tugging my arm and saying ‘Let’s go’ and in the end I did nothing. NOTHING! While that punk stood there smiling! He didn’t even flee from me.
Obviously it still eats at me to this day and I have lumped this incident with several other things in to the bin of ‘things that caused my marriage to end’.
A good story I have in this vein is that once I was out with a date, when I was teen, and we were eating at the mall food court. We sat down in a isolated area and she knocked over her soda, making a big mess. A janitor came by to clean it up and while he was doing this, I apologized for making the mess. My date, although relieved, asked why I did it and I told her that a gentleman never allows a lady to be embarrassed in public.
My vote’s for machismo BS. shrug
I believe in many of the old-fashioned tenets of classical chivalry, such as defending a woman’s honor, but getting into a bar-fight over a weak insult does not come anywhere close to fitting that definition.
Maybe your wife was upset with you for not defending her children, I’m guessing from a previous marriage as you make no claim of ownership. Maybe she’s upset that you didn’t feel parental enough to defend the kids she perceives as the Mexican part of your family.
I’m just trying to guess at her othewise irrational behavior. Because believe me, pushing you to re-open a rather ugly scene was not a rational act.
I almost took a guy out at a general admission concert when he was dancing like an idiot right on top of us, drunk and crazy with arms flailing wide and elbows a-swinging. I seem to be a magnet for such drunken idiots at concerts, whether they are punks or hippies or rednecks. They always seem to start doing the idiot dance right on top of me. But this time, my girlfriend was with me, and she is five feet tall and relies on a walker to get around in crowded situations. She was terrified of this guy (who wasn’t noticing us, or anything else), and if he had hit her once, she would have fallen or gone flying. So I stepped out of character, pushed him in the chest very hard (enough to make him stagger back a bit), and reminded him sternly to pay attention, there were people around him he was bothering, including a short girl with a disability. He stopped flailing, but stood behind us and started calling me a bitch. My girlfriend was probably even more scared at this point, but it soon became clear he wasn’t going to hit me or do anything else, so I just turned away and let him yell, continuing to enjoy the show. Eventually he wandered off to annoy another part of the audience.
When it comes down to it, I don’t want to get in a fight with anyone. Despite a lifetime diet of action movies and comic books, I know I’m a lover, not a fighter. But I couldn’t allow that behavior to continue, since he was physically endangering my girlfriend (and pissing off everyone in our general area). If worst came to worst and he swung at me, I would have beaten him to a pulp.
The ironic thing – this wasn’t a punk show or anything violent or crazy. (I would never take my girl to something like that!) It was Jenny Lewis, the demure, cute alt-country singer!