‘Pathetic:’ Husband doesn’t get why his wife was mad at how he addressed her lack of cooking skills
Not everyone is a cook. There are some basic survival skills we all should have when it comes to food but there are plenty of people who don’t really have the cooking gene. That’s all fine, but then a recent “Am I the Asshole” put bad cooking to the test.
A man explained that his wife was angry for not defending he against his mother. When his mom came for dinner, she was helping her son in the kitchen and asked his wife to help. When she started badly cutting fruit, his mother said “It’s honestly kind of pathetic that you don’t even know how to cut a piece of fruit at your age.”
He continued to call his wife “pathetic” in the story and even went as far as to say that the reason his wife was upset was because she was embarrassed over how said it was that an adult could not cut fruit. His response to the comments on the post? “I definitely think this is weaponized incompetence, I will suggest marriage counseling and cooking classes. If things don’t change I will be out. I will make this very clear.”
Now, here is the thing: The wife should at the bare minimum know how to hold a knife. I do agree there. But continually calling her pathetic because she doesn’t know what to do isn’t helping the situation at all. Some people just didn’t learn how to cook growing up. That’s not her fault. But a good husband would help her learn and not criticize her for not knowing what to do after his mother already did so.
She shouldn’t expect him to cook all the time but…pathetic? Really?
It was clear through the comments that the wife did expect him to cook for her and didn’t help even clean up after but it is also not great that this man let his mother berate her and agreed with what she said. He noted in one of the comments that she did put her own dishes away in the dishwasher but he still cleaned the rest.
He did start criticizing her skills in the comments, saying “She literally fucked up mac and cheese, like the box stuff I can’t tell if she is doing it on purpose or something I can’t live like this.” That same comment went on to say that they were supposed to host for the holidays.
The majority of the comments agreed that everyone in this situation were the “assholes.” He shouldn’t let his mother speak to his partner that way, his mother shouldn’t say that to her daughter in law, and the wife should want to know basic life skills. But it is still baffling that the husband didn’t understand why letting his wife get called pathetic and agreeing with that statement wasn’t a smart move.
I hope that she has since learned how to cut up some strawberries but I also hope that this husband maybe learned something valuable in this situation and told his mother to not call his wife “pathetic.”
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
