She’s been drinking a mug of black coffee with me in the mornings occasionally. I have a drip maker that I put 4 teaspoons Maxwell House in. Nothing beyond that.
I got this message around 11AM. We drank the coffee around 715-730.
I get that I wasn’t exactly the most sensitive I could have been, but I’m a rural mail carrier. I had to respond while stopped at a mailbox and we are GPS tracked. I get in trouble if I spend too much time stopped.
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So, you’re not wrong, but you’ve also missed the point of the interaction. This wasn’t a conversation where exchange of information was the goal, this was a bid for you to validate her feelings. The response she was seeking was empathy for what she was dealing with and by adding context and trying to explain it instead, you’ve kind of headed in the opposite direction.
Yes, I know, it’s incredibly frustrating.
This is why I really appreciate my fiance for communicating directly.
So, just from experience, be careful with that line of thinking. I thought the same, ive had friends who thought the same, and none of us had those relationships work out. Every relationship is unique, but sometimes instead of there not being a problem, your partner may just not tell you it’s a problem until it’s too late.
A person who says “I’m glad my fiancé communicates directly” is not reporting a lack of problems being discussed.
In fact the only way to know that your spouse communicates directly is for them to have directly communicated about problems.
So, the problem is… if they haven’t explicitly worked on it, it’s more likely that their fiancee just isn’t communicating problems to them and is just letting them fester inside and telling them everything is ‘fine’. Everyone is different, but statistically women are the initiators for the majority of divorces and one of the key commonalities is that it’s tremendously common that the men were surprised because they thought things were going great and their former partner was ‘different’ and ‘special’. The majority of us aren’t going to be special though. There’s a reason it’s one of the first things you learn about in marriage counseling (Honestly, it’s nearly the entirety of marriage counseling) and if you think you’ve solved the problem, it’s more likely that you just aren’t doing it right.
There’s a point to the interaction beyond losing a friend?
Seconded
She insulted your coffee and put the blame on you, overshared her bowel movements, then said you were mean for a straightforward polite response.
There’s an asshole here but it ain’t you.
Bowel movements? Theres nothing about those in there
feeling queasy
Maybe a bit blunt, but nothing I’d consider mean if someone said it to me. In the future, just try acknowledging instead of explaining
I like this advice. Thank you
You were not incredibly mean.
Incredibly mean is putting shrooms in the coffee maker and not telling anyone.
I know someone who did this to their mom for a month, she thought she was losing her mind.
That’s hilarious and cruel all at once
I mean, she lost her job and almost ended up committed until this asshole copped to it, thinking it was a hilarious joke!
Yeah turns out that guy burned out his brain on all sorts of drugs and eventually ended up committed instead.
It is about as funny as roofying someone before they go do their day job operating heavy machinery, or breaking their hand before a piano concert.
it’s the kind of thing that’s a funny hypothetical but a horrible thing in reality.
She seems incredibly fragile.
Literally nothing even remotely mean about what you said… does this person react this way a lot?
I think they were going for sympathy, not dismissiveness.
The problem is putting the “my heart is going bananas and I feel queasy” before the “what the crap you do with that coffee” makes it so that the palpation and queasiness aren’t all that big of a deal.
Invert them and the message is more about what’s happening instead of the coffee.
(At least that’s how I would see/read it)
You made coffee.
They drank the coffee.
They’re complaining about the coffee being too strong
Solution: coffee drinker tastes it before having a full cup, and waters it down as needed, rather than complaining about how someone else made the coffee they’re drinking.
The first message in the screenshot is the only one I would consider slightly mean, but even that is just barely. I can’t fathom how they would consider your reply mean, let alone “incredibly” so.
I see nothing wrong with what you said out how you said it.
Nothing wrong at all in my opinion.
Caffeine has an 8 hour half-life. So it definitely wasn’t out of her system, fwiw.
Tangental, but I thought it was 5. Somewhat diminished, then.
It’s a range, but lots of things can increase the half life, from being pregnant to oral contraceptives, and there is a difference in rate of reported effects between men and women. One source.
Most importantly, there is a massive variation in how sensitive individual people are to caffeine.
Nah, definitely NTA. A little dismissive, and definitely seems like they expected sympathy, but by making accusations against you over “what the crap you do with that coffee”, it sets you up to be in a defensive position to reply.
I guess be a little more mindful to only give sympathy and not an explanation in the future, and they need to learn to chill a bit.
NTA
Also the last paragraph of your post makes you seem overly defensive. IMO you don’t have to justify your totally normal behaviour.
A slightly “better” response that she might have been looking for is “Sorry to hear that, I made the coffee how I normally do - 4tsp of <coffee> in the drip maker. Maybe it’s starting to wear off by now?”
Still has the content you included, but in a more sympathetic pattern that she might be receptive of.Not sure I’d call any of that mean, but you are wrong about it being out of her system. The half-life of caffeine in the body is around 5 hours on average, so at 11 am should would likely have more than 50% of the caffeine from the morning coffee still remaining
