There are certain hills you should be willing to die on in a relationship. And then there are the hills that are actually just piles of your own weird insecurities that you should probably dismantle with a therapist instead of a battle axe. This, friends, is a story about the second kind. A woman has decided that a father comforting his sick child is inappropriate, and yikes, we need to talk about it.
Our narrator is a 35-year-old woman who has been dating “Tom,” a 37-year-old dad, for almost two years. Tom has a 13-year-old daughter named Aspen. Right off the bat, the girlfriend notes that Tom has always “babied” Aspen, a comment that is already dripping with a little bit of judgment.
Recently, poor Aspen got sick, and Tom, being a good dad, stepped up the care and comfort. The girlfriend, however, has decided that at the ancient, worldly age of thirteen, Aspen “doesn’t need to be babied anymore.” She even expressed this to Tom, who rightly pointed out that his sick kid is still young and needs to be taken care of. A concept that seems to have completely flown over the girlfriend’s head.
The real drama went down one night when she was heading over to Tom’s place. He told her the door was unlocked, so she just walked right in. And what did she find? A scene of horror? Debauchery? Nope. She walked in to find his sick 13-year-old daughter laying on his lap, fast asleep. A sweet, innocent, completely normal picture of a loving father comforting his unwell child.
But this girlfriend didn’t see a sweet moment. She saw a problem. She immediately asked Tom if he thought Aspen was “a little too old to be doing this.” Tom, again, being a normal human being, said no, especially since she’s sick. This is where a sane person would drop it, realizing they are the one being weird. But she didn’t.
Instead, she doubled down. She insisted that Aspen is too old and that this behavior “needs to stop.” Needs. To. Stop. The audacity is truly something to behold. She has been in this girl’s life for less than two years and she thinks she has the authority to dictate how a father comforts his own daughter.
This is the moment Tom finally had enough. He told her she was being an ahole and that she needed to stop being weird about something that is completely normal. And when she took her case to her friends, expecting backup, they told her the same thing. She was the ahole.
Let’s be crystal clear: A 13-year-old is not a grown woman. She is a child. A sick 13-year-old is a child who feels miserable and wants comfort from her parent. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, weird or inappropriate about a young teen snuggling up with her dad when she doesn’t feel well. It’s a sign of a healthy, secure attachment.
The only person being weird here is the girlfriend. She is the one s*xualizing a completely non-s*xual, paternal moment. She is the one projecting her own discomfort and bizarre hang-ups onto a beautiful father-daughter relationship. Her feelings are not Tom’s or Aspen’s problem. They are her problem.
So, is she the ahole? Yes. A thousand times, yes. She is the ahole. Her boyfriend is right. Her friends are right. She is so far in the wrong here that she can’t even see the line anymore.
Her job as the girlfriend is to support her partner and his relationship with his child, not to try and police it based on her own unfounded weirdness. If an innocent moment between a dad and his sick kid makes her this uncomfortable, she needs to do some serious self-reflection, because the problem isn’t on that couch. It’s the person standing in the doorway.