Mom Says She May Have 'Overreacted' After Kicking Son's Girlfriend Out Minutes After They Met For The First Time
What the girlfriend said to her is truly unbelievable. But did it warrant being kicked out of her house? Or did she deserve far worse?
PC Photography, jeangill / Getty Images, Icons8Photos, otomedream via Canva All of us at one time or another have made a bad first impression by ramming our foot directly into our mouths when meeting someone. But in all sincerity, I promise you, you have never done so as badly as the young woman in the story you are about to hear.
A mom on Reddit described the scenario with her son's girlfriend in a post to the "r/AmITheA--hole" subReddit, a forum where people go to try to figure out if they were in the wrong in a conflict. She's worried she may have overreacted when her son's girlfriend introducing herself for the first time with a ribald joke—the kind that really should have stayed in her drafts.
A mom kicked her son's girlfriend out of her house because she made a very bad first impression.
You only get one chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes, and this young woman really took a chance. And as you might have sussed out by now, it did not pay off. At all.
The mom was excited to meet the girlfriend, who's been dating her son for a year.
On paper, she seemed like the perfect girl for her 24-year-old son. "He’s been crazy about her," she writes, and he described her as a truly wonderful catch. "She just got her degree, was enjoying her job, family-oriented, etc."
And this being her son's first serious relationship, the stakes were even higher. "Apparently they’ve been dating for a year before he decided to have her meet us officially," she writes, going on to say that she and her husband think this is the first time he's cared this much about one of his girlfriends.
"I’m honestly just glad he’s happy with her," she says. "My husband and I don’t think he’s ever been this into someone before." Wonderful as that is, however, it's also what made the bad first impression the girlfriend made sting all the more, and why she feels "pretty bad about what I did."
The girlfriend introduced herself with a joke about her son's genitals.
To introduce the girlfriend to the family, the mom and her son had planned a highly anticipated dinner get-together. "By now we’d been anticipating meeting her with how much our son has been gushing about her," the mom writes, "how perfect she is, that she’s ‘the one’, in his words."
So when the doorbell rang, she and her husband were excited. "She looks exactly like her pictures," she writes, and her son was "grinning ear to ear," which she called a great start. "And then," the mom writes, "she opens her mouth."
Now take a moment and imagine what you might say in the girlfriend's shoes. This is the first time you're meeting your beau's mom—the man you might end up spending the rest of your life with, introducing you to what is probably the most significant person in his life besides you. What would you say to her?
Would your opening line to your potential future mother-in-law be, in a million years—in your wildest imagination—something like, "I’m the one your son puts his penis in"?
No? It wouldn't even occur to you to ever, under any circumstances, to speak of your boyfriend's genitals to his mother, because the mere thought makes you want to tear your skin off and scream into the void? Well! Suffice to say you and this young woman are built very different, because that is what she said!
And her monumentally bad first impression made all hell break loose.
The mom immediately kicked the new girlfriend out of the house, and even her 'jokester' husband was offended.
"To be frank, I was appalled," the mom writes, going on to say she "expected my husband to laugh" because both he and her son love a good joke, but even he seemed shocked. "Maybe I’m reserved, but... of all things to say to her boyfriend’s parents—whom she’d never met—she chose THAT?" she writes.
She goes on to say that she was so "disturbed by the visual it put in my head" that her discomfort turned into anger. "I told her to get out, and I wanted to say more about how gross it made me feel but I fortunately left it at that."
Her son, of course, was crestfallen and begged his mom "to give her another chance," but she was too angry to relent. "Even my husband, who’s enjoyed his fair share of raunchy jokes, wouldn’t let up," she went on to say.
But after they left, she says she "immediately felt guilty"—especially given how excited her son was. She's considering giving the girlfriend a second chance, but her husband feels differently.
People all over the internet were in disbelief at what the girlfriend said.
People on Reddit were most unanimous that the mom was totally in the right to be offended. "I'm pretty liberal and open-minded," one Redditor wrote, "but... seriously? You opened the door and that's what flies out of her mouth?"
"Why would anyone ever say that to their boyfriend's parents lmao," another person wrote. "SHE SAID WHAT" was all a TikTok commenter could muster in response, while another said, "I would have had to close the door right then and there."
People on YouTube were no less shocked.
"Is there a handbook for worst conversation starters?" one commenter asked. "If so, she wrote it."
Still, as shocked as they were, many Redditors thought perhaps the girlfriend made an anxiety-fueled mistake, and the mom should give the girlfriend another chance. And for her part, she agrees—on one condition.
"I’d love to give her another chance!," she wrote to a fellow Redditor. "Just as long as I’m not given any more graphic visuals (especially at dinner)." That seems like a more than fair trade-off!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.