agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

DEAR HARRIETTE: Halloween is around the corner, so I decided to take my boyfriend to a haunted house attraction for a fun date night. We were both excited, and he expressed nothing but enthusiasm for our plans.

When we entered the haunted house, things immediately went left. My boyfriend was completely horrified and begged me to leave early.

Now I can’t help but feel a little nervous about our relationship. Is it possible that I’m dating a coward? I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I paid good money for our tickets, and he couldn’t even put on a brave face for me for the night.

I think this says a lot about how fearful of a person he could potentially be. Am I overthinking it?

— Man Up

DEAR MAN UP: Something else may have been going on that triggered your boyfriend’s reaction. Find out what’s up.

Ask him why he reacted so strongly. What upset him? Continue and ask him what else frightens him. You are in the getting-to-know-you stage, so listen carefully and observe.

You can also tell him that it bothered you that he got so scared, and you want to understand what happened. The more you get to know him, the better you will come to understand his motivations.

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Well, LW sounds charming, but all the same I think it's probably for the best if they break it up. LW can date somebody who isn't "a coward", and Boyfriend can date somebody who isn't absolutely toxic.

100% agreed. Yuck.

Yes!

Valid times to complain that someone is "a coward" = when they won't have an honest conversation with a romantic partner about their feelings, their goals, their boundaries.

Not Valid = complaining when they don't enjoy haunted houses!

Yep. Not everybody enjoys being scared for fun (I say, as someone who has read and watched a ton of horror in my lifetime), and there's no shame in not being into it.

Also, liking some horror/haunts/etc. doesn't mean that you like it ALL, under every set of circumstances -- I have a Hard Nope about horror that I describe as "man's inhumanity to man," and am only interested in books/movies that focus on supernatural, sci-fi, fantasy, monsters, etc.

(That attitude took a while to develop -- it felt like I developed more empathy after my teens/twenties, and I just can't stomach that kind of thing anymore.)

I absolutely don't require a partner to be into the exact same things that I am, and that doesn't make anyone a "coward" for not caring for certain types of entertainment.

yuppppppp

Yeah.

As someone who loves haunted houses and all things scary, I agree with you 100%. Just because some of us love them doesn’t mean they’re for everyone, and it doesn’t make someone a “coward” if they don’t enjoy getting scared as a leisure activity. Assuming that everyone should be into our specific fun-time activities, and if they’re not then there’s something wrong with them, is a shitty way to be, no matter what the activity in question is.

I am tempted to write a That Bad Advice style paragraph along those lines.

Whaaaaaaaat the fuck. Whole LW disposal service!

Ugh. LW sounds awful.

It's okay if LW enjoys haunted houses, but they shouldn't try to shame/police someone else who doesn't! :(

there are no words for what a shit LW is - and Harriette isn't much better, that's really ungreat 'advice'

Harriette is almost* always awful. It's exasperating.

I feel like I've done nothing but typo correction this week, so I'm really sorry that I'm about to do it again, but is that asterisk supposed to lead somewhere? (I swear, I only do it because in those very specific situations I think I'd like to know!)

I clearly need to go sleep for a week.

The asterisk was supposed to be followed by "I remember ONE TIME where I said "wow, Harriette's advice didn't suck!" and I should go find the post."

Stopped clock, twice a day, etc.

I find it tough to see how LW would enforce a definition of "not a coward" that wouldn't also come with an entire festering stew of toxic masculinity.

Yeah, I'm getting serious "Come back with your shield or on it!" vibes.

If coming back on your shield is actually a possibility at this haunted house, I think I'll pass

Ask him why he reacted so strongly. What upset him?
Well, that's good advice in this situation I think.

Continue and ask him what else frightens him.
And it suddenly turns bizarre. Something about the way this is phrased just raises all my alarms.

I have to wonder what kind of haunted house attraction LW took him to.

Because there are some I'll tolerate OK, but a lot I absolutely will not at ALL. I have a friend who does extreme haunts and loves them and...nope. Not for me. (Like she enjoyed a haunt where the actors are allowed to physically grab you, drag you around, chain you up, confine you in spaces and terrorize you for extended periods of time. I didn't know that was a thing that existed.) Even on the mild end, there are things like...some people really don't want to deal with clowns, or zombies, or whatever.

For me, haunted house attractions require a LOT of informed consent.

Yes, that was my immediate thought. There haunted houses, and then there are gory splatterfests consisting of increasingly "edgy" transgressions of one kind or another, or of many kinds as you describe...

Yeah, like, I'm fine with creepiness and gore and jumpscares and all kinds of things, but I've been to a few haunts where it crossed over from "this is scary and fun" to "this is unsafe and people could easily get actually hurt" and at that point, I leave. It doesn't even have to be the deliberately "extreme" ones, a lot of them are set up by high school kids with no safety training.

Sometimes I was wrong. Like as a child I wouldn't go anywhere near anything that had chainsaw-wielding maniacs because I had been taught to be careful around people with chainsaws and they weren't following the safety rules! Eventually someone told me that you can take the sharp part off and it's fine.

But sometimes they really are being actively unsafe and crossing the lines or clearly don't know what they're doing. I think it's interesting that LW doesn't say the boyfriend was scared or frightened, but that he was "horrified", which really sounds more like "this place is clearly full of black mold and that staircase could collapse any moment and people are running around in the dark over unsafe ground" than "oh no, too many jumpscares".

There are also "Christian" haunted houses, sometimes known as "Hell houses", intended to scare people into converting to evangelical Baptist Christianity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_house

I don't know if they're still run this way but when I heard about them many years ago, a lot of them were marketed as regular haunted houses in order to lure in unsuspecting Hallowe'en celebrants.

If someone knowingly took me into one of these, I'd be PISSED.

I thought of that, too.

Oooh, yeah, hard no from me, agreed!

I agree with the consensus, this LW sounds like a seriously horrible person and should break up with this "cowardly" boyfriend before they hurt him badly.

The only thing that gives me slight pause is that BF expressed nothing but enthusiasm; not liking haunted houses is completely fine, but maybe he should have said from the start, I'm sorry, I don't think I would really enjoy that as a date activity. That could be a sign of a communication problem. On the other hand it's very possible that there was one particular type of horror there that triggered him that he didn't know about in advance.

Yeah, sometimes implementation details matter. My wife once suggested a tour of some underground catacombs; I paid for the tickets; we got to the threshold and she stopped dead and said it was going to set off her claustrophobia, and she noped right out of that excursion.

Yes, with a different LW I think “so you seemed enthusiastic about it during planning, was there an issue you weren’t expecting…? I’d like to avoid taking you to things you won’t enjoy” would be a perfectly reasonable conversation. It doesn’t sound like this LW is likely to have that conversation, though.

But that would involve caring; why do that when LW can just decide it's cowardice and be judgy about it? /s

I really wish we had the bf's side of things.

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