A Woman Left A Date At A Restaurant To Buy A Bottle Of Ranch — Her Date's Reaction Has Her Wondering If She Was Wrong
We've all been on some weird dates, but this one takes the cake—or the ranch, in this case.
file404, MITStudio, Asier Romero, Pavel L Photo and Video / Shutterstock.com; Canva All of us have war stories about weird dating experiences from our time in the romance trenches—awkward dinners, bad kissers, oversharers. We've all been there.
But a woman on Reddit recently posted a story about her own dating behavior that is truly on another level. She told the story in a post to the "r/AmITheA--hole" subreddit, a forum for people to ask neutral strangers whether they were in the wrong in a conflict. And as she revealed, her seeming lack of understanding of why her behavior was strange makes the whole thing even odder.
A woman is so obsessed with ranch dressing she left a date at a restaurant to buy a bottle.
Sure, we all want our food the way we want it, and who doesn't love a good ranch dip with their fried food or their pizza now and again? But is it really so serious that when you're at an authentic restaurant you have to leave to buy your own ranch supply in order to eat your dinner? For this woman, it absolutely was.
The woman eats almost all of her food with ranch dressing on it.
"There's very few things I don't eat with ranch," the woman wrote in her post. And you thought you were obsessed with ranch. "I just like it and it helps make some things easier to eat so I always have it with my meals." That habit came top of mind during her third date with a man named Michael.
"He took me to one of his favorite restaurants," she writes of the date, "a hole-in-the-wall Polish/Hungarian place." If you're the type who loves to try food from authentic spots, you'll know it's the "hole-in-the-wall" places that usually have the best food, and her date was clearly excited to have her try Polish and Hungarian cuisine.
"He ordered a sampler plate so I could try different things," she writes. When the food arrived, she asked for her usual ranch. But if you've ever been to Europe, you'll know that ranch is for the most part an exclusively American thing, so unsurprisingly the Polish and Hungarian restaurants didn't have any.
Instead, the waiter brought out "some kind of sour cream and dill sauces." She gave them the ol' college try, "but they just weren't the same," she writes. And that's when things went sideways.
The woman told her offended date and restaurant staff she couldn't enjoy her food without ranch dressing.
Not content to simply get through a single meal without her beloved ranch, the woman "took my wallet and left the restaurant," walking over to a nearby convenience store and purchasing her own bottle of ranch dressing.
"Michael looked shocked but didn't say anything and ate his food," she writes. The restaurant staff, however, were not quite so patient. "The waiter came over and said outside food wasn't allowed," which is pretty reasonable given that, you know, restaurants are places that sell food? She didn't see it that way however.
"I said dressing isn't outside food and they didn't have what I needed to enjoy my meal," she writes. But to avoid further upset, she took the bottle of ranch dressing to her car and thought that would be the end of it. She was wrong.
Her date broke up with her because of how obsessed with ranch dressing she is.
“When we finished and left, Michael thanked me for coming out with him but said it was really off-putting that I had to leave and go buy a bottle of dressing instead of just going one meal without it," she writes. Which, you know... isn't unreasonable. It's one meal! You are presumably an adult who goes on dates and everything, not a five-year-old child who cannot eat toast unless it is cut with a dinosaur cookie cutter!
Nevertheless, she persisted. "I told him I wouldn’t have had to do that if they had had ranch or any dressings like a normal restaurant," she replied. Which, YIKES. Michael had the reaction that probably most of us would have had. "He didn’t walk me to my car or anything and just left."
Still, she didn't see what the problem was, and insists that "a condiment" isn't a meal. As you might guess, almost nobody sees it her way.
Nearly everyone agreed that the woman's ranch dressing stunt was awkward, rude and strange.
Not even her roommate was on her side. "She asked me if I was being serious," when she told her roommate the story, and told her she "had bad etiquette" and "embarrassed Michael to the point that he was probably going to stop talking to me." Yep! Probably!
Her fellow Redditors were no less shocked, though considerably more direct.
"[You're the a--hole] for leaving Michael and going to buy the ranch dressing, bringing it in the restaurant, arguing with the waiter, and being so oblivious to how immature and inappropriate this was," one Redditor wrote. "But good on you for giving Michael priceless insight into your priorities so he could nope on out after only three dates."
"It's okay to love ranch. It's okay to think 'man, I wish they had ranch,'" another person wrote. "It's definitely not okay to compulsively need ranch so much that you're physically unable to eat a meal without it and leave a restaurant just to get your fix."
People on Twitter were no less shocked. One woman theorized that a life spent yoked to a woman obsessed with ranch dressing was one Michael simply couldn't bear to live.
And who can blame him? But in the end, there is a silver lining. As another Reddit user put it, "Michael telling this story will be a hit at parties!"
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.