agonyaunt | (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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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!