This Boyfriend’s Mom Gave His Gf a Literal “Purity Test,” and He Thinks She’s the Ahole

Meeting the parents is always a nerve-wracking experience. It’s a high-stakes audition where you’re just hoping to be normal enough, charming enough, and not accidentally spill wine on their white carpet. But one woman on Reddit just walked into what she thought was a nice Sunday dinner and found herself in an episode of The Twilight Zone, complete with a high-tech inquisition.

Our narrator, a 26-year-old woman, has been happily dating her boyfriend Ryan for 10 months. Things were great, so it was time to meet his parents. The mom, “Karen,” was all smiles and hugs at first. You know the type. “Heard so much about you!” But that welcoming vibe took a dark turn during dinner.

Karen started with some weird, pointed questions. “So how many serious relationships have you had before Ryan?” and “What made those end?” Talk about an awkward thing to navigate over mashed potatoes. The girlfriend tried to keep it vague, but Karen was pushing. Still, this was just the appetizer for the main course of crazy.

After dinner, Ryan and his dad went outside to “grill dessert,” which is a whole other kind of weird, but okay. This left Karen alone with her prey. She sat down on the couch, pulled out her phone, and dropped this gem: “I know this might seem old fashioned but I care deeply about who my son ends up with.” Oh boy.

I need you to prepare yourself for what comes next, because I am not making this up. The mom opened an app on her phone. A literal app. It was called something like “Purity Test Calculator.” And she started reading the questions out loud, expecting her son’s 26-year-old girlfriend to answer them. We are talking questions like, “Have you lived with a partner before marriage?” and “Have you been intimate with more than 3 people?” and it only got more invasive.

Our hero, like any sane human being, was so completely shocked she couldn’t even form words. She just stared. But in Karen’s bizarro-world, silence equals guilt. She took the stunned silence as a “refusal to answer” and had the audacity to say, “I see. So you have things to hide.”

This was the breaking point. The girlfriend, a true queen, stood up and said she needed to use the bathroom. But instead of going to the bathroom, she grabbed her purse, walked straight out the front door, and called an Uber from the driveway. A flawless exit. A 10-out-of-10 escape.

Now we get to the real problem in this story: the boyfriend. Ryan, who was presumably busy charring a pineapple, didn’t even notice his girlfriend was gone for 20 minutes. When he finally came inside and realized she’d bolted, who do you think he got mad at? Not his app-wielding, inquisitorial mother. No. He got mad at his girlfriend.

He blew up her phone, saying she “embarrassed him” in front of his parents. He said she should have just “played along” to keep the peace. Played along? Played along with what? Her own ritualistic shaming? This isn’t a harmless game of charades, my dude. This is a grown woman being interrogated about her s*xual history by a stranger with a smartphone.

The excuses are just pathetic. Ryan’s mom is apparently “crying,” saying the girlfriend “rejected her attempt to get to know me better.” An attempt to get to know her better? No. Getting to know someone is asking about their job, their hobbies, or their favorite movie. It is not, and has never been, demanding a numerical count of their past partners via a one-star app.

Ryan’s final defense is the nail in his own coffin. He says his mom is just “protective” and “religious.” That’s not protective; it’s controlling. That’s not religious; it’s invasive and creepy. There is no religious text that justifies this level of bat-crap crazy.

So, is she the ahole? Absolutely not. She just found out she’s dating a man who, when faced with a choice between his unhinged mother and his humiliated girlfriend, will throw his girlfriend under the bus every single time. That “purity test” was a gift. It just saved her a lifetime of misery.