The Veto
She renamed a kitten. That is the entire crime. And his mother's response was to tell him to think about ending the relationship.
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Episode guide
Four stories this morning, and in every one of them there is an extra person in the couple. Somebody outside the relationship is holding the deciding vote.
A kitten gets renamed, and a mother turns it into a referendum on whether her son should stay. A best friend runs a running commentary on a girlfriend she has decided isn't the one. A nineteen-year-old's friend group has been quietly rearranged by one person who cannot be corrected about anything, including a film. And a fiancé's mate keeps three years of screenshots in a phone and delivers them at exactly the right moment.
None of those outsiders were elected. They just started voting, and nobody inside the couple stopped them.
These are anonymous posters' accounts, paraphrased so nobody can be identified. A Reddit post is one person's version of events rather than proof of every claim in it, and a comment section is a crowd of readers reacting, not a verdict. Where a poster reports what somebody else said or sent, this piece repeats it as the poster's account. All four threads went up in the last day; the fourth is a roundup of a saga that began in January 2016 and carries its own updates through April that year.
The kitten
A boyfriend's father found a kitten on the side of a road, and the family took it in for a couple of weeks. His mother, Shannon, did the feeding. They already had seven cats, so the kitten needed a house, and the poster had one cat and a spare floor.
Before handing the kitten over, Shannon said two things: don't change the name, and send photos every day. The poster read that as a joke, so she used the name she had already picked out. People rename the animals they adopt. 1
Shannon then pulled her son aside and told him he should think about breaking it off with her, because she didn't respect them. In his face, she put it like this: if she wants to be part of this family, she needs to respect us and act like it, and I asked for two simple things and I've gotten neither.
Two things, both of them about a cat. Except they aren't about a cat at all — the shape is set now. This week it's the kitten's name, next it's the wedding, then it's the baby's name, then how she's holding the baby, and nobody has to say anything new again.
The detail that gives the poster away is the question she asks at the end. Not whether renaming the cat was rude. Whether she should feel worse than she currently does. Her own mother and her boyfriend both say she did nothing wrong, so she is the only person in the story who suspects she is the arsehole.
The gold digger
Six months in, and he is the whole package. This is the one thing wrong. 2
Carly is his best friend. Carly has been with her husband for eight years and married to him for two. The first thing the poster noticed was that none of his other friends can stand her. When he told Carly he had a girlfriend, she said she was happy for him, and then said: keep your options open. She had not met the poster. That sentence was about a person who did not exist yet.
At their first meeting, Carly ran at him and hugged him, and did not look at the woman introducing herself; then she sat with her back to her all night. On his twenty-ninth birthday day trip, Carly spent the afternoon saying how much she loved him, with comments aimed sideways at the poster. She eventually spoke to her directly to ask what football team she supported. The poster does not watch football and said she would like to learn. Carly laughed and asked: do you like anything? Then she told him, in front of everyone, that the poster isn't the one — in front of her own husband, who asked the poster if she was all right and told his wife to stop.
The manicure was for a wedding the week before and the poster paid for it herself. Carly delivered five minutes on how she is high maintenance and a gold digger. The poster pointed out that they split everything fifty-fifty. Carly brought up the one time he bought her flowers. At another friend's birthday, the birthday girl told the poster she never invited Carly — the boyfriend just brought her — and that Carly had been nasty to her too when she first joined the group.
His answer to all of it is that that's just Carly. It isn't a description of Carly; it's a decision he has made, that her behaviour is weather and everybody else carries an umbrella. The person being insulted keeps explaining herself inside her own relationship, and the one person who could end the conversation never has to. She is asking whether she is insecure. She is being talked about at volume in a room she was invited to.
The Purge
The poster is nineteen, her best friend is eighteen, and his girlfriend is nineteen, which matters: everything that follows is behaviour with nobody's hand on it. 3
On a trip to Amsterdam with the four of them, the girlfriend stood in a bike lane, and when the poster told her to get out of it, the answer was that it was none of her business and drivers should just see her and drive around her. She then insisted all four of them do everything together, refused to pick anything, and told their mutual friends the poster was being bossy. She shit-talks the poster; when she heard it had landed badly, she explained that she was allowed to, because the poster is a bitch and she is in the right.
After the poster and her boyfriend had a fight, the girlfriend — who otherwise ignores the poster's messages — sent a million questions about it, then a long sour message about being left on read.
Then came the argument about The Purge. The girlfriend knows it is a film. She also thinks it is obviously a documentary, because where else would they have got the footage. Twenty minutes of a birthday party tried to explain how footage works. The poster, quietly, mentioned that she has lived in America and can promise it isn't a thing, and the girlfriend got up, shouted, tried to belittle her, and stormed out. A person who cannot be corrected about a film is not going to be corrected about a friendship.
The rest is not funny. She makes digs at what the poster wears, at her interests, and at her disability — the poster is deaf and hard of hearing. She uses a slur for intersex people and tells people it is the correct term. A friend of hers once laughed at the poster for asking her boyfriend to translate in her own country, and that friend was then not allowed to come for dinner, which became an argument too.
There is a second target: a seventeen-year-old the girlfriend calls stupid, whose looks she mocks to her face and behind her back, and whose past mental health she drags into it in front of people. When the poster defends her, the girlfriend jokes that they are probably secretly lesbians, and says she feels sexually harassed — by the two of them being bisexual, by them kissing each other, and by them going to the toilet together.
So the poster has stopped going to things. She has left hangouts early, and she is considering ending a friendship she does not want to end, because she won't make him choose and she can't keep watching him let it happen either. What she wants from him is one sentence — that this isn't okay. It has been months, and nobody in the story has said it.
The drawer
She is thirty-three, he is thirty-three, they have been together three years, and last week he proposed. 4
The thing that prompted it was a fire. A fire started at his neighbour's place while he was out of town, and she went in and got his dog out, along with his laptop and things no insurance would have covered. Two days later, before a party, he told her he had always known she was the one, and that this made him want to start the year knowing they would be married next year.
Two days after that, his friend Adam called her and said they needed to talk. Adam is the friend who never liked her: he flirted with her the first night they met and she told him to back off. He is charming, rich, hosts the parties and lends people his holiday house, and talks about his sex life when it is her and the lads. She had stayed polite to him.
Adam showed her a text thread — his, with her fiancé, from three years earlier. In the poster's account of those messages, Tom writes that a very beautiful girl he had slept with a few times had ended up with someone else, that she is the one, and that the poster is no Megan, but not bad: she seemed keen, she was marriage material. The thread runs for months on how much hotter Megan is, on both of them laughing about her telling Adam to back off, and on Tom writing about the poster's body and her past in the sort of language that only works when she isn't in the room. Adam loves every word of it, and says so.
Then the fresh messages. Megan is single again, and Tom sends Adam screenshots of their chat with the caption: what do you think, she's into me. Adam replies: hell yeah, I think you have a chance. Nowhere in any of it does Tom mention that he is engaged, in either direction.
The poster got into his Facebook — she had seen the password years earlier, over his taxes — and read the thread herself. Megan did the approaching. He never told her, and he made plans to see her in a week, while the poster was out of town. The poster messaged Megan: I'm his fiancée, we got engaged a few days ago, the rest is up to you. Megan never opened it.
She came back from her trip early anyway. Megan turned out to be lovely and furious at a man she had never met, and agreed to a plan: they would walk into that date together. Instead Tom cancelled it, texting Megan that he was engaged and shouldn't see her, and apologising for bringing her down. So the poster spent the evening drinking with Megan instead, and at some point a housemate helped them change their Facebook statuses to say the two of them were engaged. Tom arrived with flowers. The housemate yelled that Scummy Tom was at the door and shut it in his face.
She gave the ring back. He explained that Adam had a falling-out with the group over money and that this was revenge — which may even be true, and does not touch a word of what he wrote about her. He said he had grown up. He said he had cancelled the date, so wasn't that a point in his favour.
Three months later she ended it: she did not want to be anyone's second choice or backup plan. He left the ring on her doorstep, saying it was a gift and might remind him of better days, so she pawned it and paid for a semester of college for a refugee kid she mentors. Then he asked for it back.
The ending is the good part. She met someone at a silent reading party — an hour of people reading in a room before optional mingling — and he answers texts with exclamation marks. Megan is dating again and they joke about a double date. Adam asked her to coffee and announced that he needs to settle down and get married; she told him he would make the worst husband ever, except for Tom.
In three years, nobody said a true thing to her face. Every honest sentence in that relationship arrived through Adam's phone, and Adam was enjoying himself. That is the veto — somebody else's hand on the brake the whole time.
Your group chat this morning
A cat with the wrong name. A best friend who calls her a gold digger over a manicure. A nineteen-year-old who thinks The Purge is a documentary. And three years of screenshots that only ever moved because a friend decided to send them.
In all four, the deciding vote was cast by somebody who isn't in the relationship.
So: what has an outsider vetoed in your relationship? Not the dramatic version — a name, a mate, a plate of food, a haircut. And who did they say it to: you, or the person you live with?
References
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