Winter storms are the ultimate relationship stress test. They strip away the niceties of romance and leave you with the raw logistics of survival. Who is willing to shovel the driveway? Who is willing to brave the icy roads to make sure their partner gets home safe? Usually, this is where the “partners” in partnership step up. But one woman on Reddit just discovered that her boyfriend’s limit for heroism is apparently a fifty-minute drive in a heated car.
The OP (Original Poster) starts by painting a picture of a relationship dynamic that is already raising some eyebrows. She works a full-time job and commutes. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, is currently unemployed and living off his “rich dad.” His daily schedule involves sleeping until late afternoon and playing video games all night. He has a car and a license. She has a license but no car.
Because she is the one bringing home a paycheck and he is the one defeating bosses in video games, they have an agreement. He picks her up from work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It seems like a fair trade. He has literally nothing else to do, and she is working to support herself. But then came the snowstorm.
The weather was wicked. We are talking near-zero visibility and plows that couldn’t keep up. The OP’s commute, which is usually twenty minutes, was looking like a nightmare. She doesn’t have her phone at work, so when she clocked out at 5:30 PM, she was greeted by a wall of texts from her boyfriend. He wasn’t outside waiting. He was safe at home, texting her about how Google Maps estimated a fifty-one-minute drive and how “awful” it looked out there.
So he decided not to come. He looked at the map, saw that he might have to sit in traffic for less than an hour, and decided that his girlfriend could just figure it out. He ended his texts with the manipulative “I hope you don’t hate me,” which is the classic cry of a man who knows exactly how terrible he is being but wants you to comfort him about it.
The OP was annoyed but tried to be understanding. She shouldn’t have been. While he stayed warm, she stood in blizzard conditions for thirty-five minutes just waiting for her first bus. Her legs went numb. She was covered in ice pellets. When she finally got on the bus, the heat melted the ice and left her soaking wet for the remainder of the journey. This wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was physically painful.
The commute home took three hours. She was stranded in the cold between connections for forty minutes at a time. Meanwhile, her boyfriend was presumably warm, dry, and maybe even a few levels deeper into his game. By the time she got home at 8:30 PM, she was so frozen and defeated that she ate leftover pasta in the bathtub. That is a bleak image.
The audacity of this man is staggering. He has a car. He has no job. He has nowhere to be. The only thing asked of him was to ensure the safety of his partner during a dangerous storm. He weighed his own minor discomfort against her safety and decided he would rather stay home. A fifty-minute drive in a car with a heater is a luxury compared to a three-hour ordeal on public transit in a blizzard.
The next morning, the OP had to leave for work again while he was still “snuggled up in bed.” She had to bite her tongue to keep from losing it. Honestly, she has more restraint than most of us. If your partner leaves you to freeze because they don’t like traffic, they aren’t a partner. They are a roommate with a car they won’t share.
So is the OP the ahole? Absolutely not. She was abandoned in hazardous conditions by someone with the means to help her. If he is too scared to drive in the snow, that is one thing, but he seems more “inconvenienced” than terrified.
What would you do if your partner left you to take the bus in a blizzard? Would you eat your pasta in the bath, or would you be packing your bags? Let us know in the comments if you think the boyfriend needs a serious reality check!