Man Calls Customer ‘Weird’ For Constantly Referring To His Partner As ‘My Wife’ — ‘It’s Like You Own Her Or Something’
"If I just started talking about Julia you wouldn’t know who I was talking about…."
MAYA LAB | Shutterstock Everyone has their weird little things that drive them crazy. I, for instance, hate it when people use the word "myriad" as a noun instead of an adjective like it's intended (yes, it is; do not argue with me, I swear to God).
But am I going to scold you for saying something like, "There are a myriad of reasons I can't seem to use this word correctly?" No! Because who cares! Life is short and mostly terrible — who has the time or energy to start drama over these insignificant peccadilloes?
Yet, as we've all experienced, there are myriad people out there (see what I did there) who simply cannot and will not let these things go and have to lodge a complaint about them. Such was the case for a man on Reddit who got scolded by another man for something the internet could not believe he cared about in the first place.
The man was scolded for calling his wife 'my wife.' You know, because… she's his wife.
Honestly, now I've heard everything. Obviously, we're in an era where gender norms are rapidly evolving and people are more mindful about their speech than they've probably ever been, and that's mostly good. (Mostly.) But even by those modern standards, this story is absurd.
The man wrote in a since-deleted Reddit post that he and his wife (oops, pardon me) own a small retail garden center, and one day, he went to pick up some trees from a nearby vendor who ran a nursery.
While speaking to the owner of the tree nursery, the Redditor mentioned that his wife is an expert in garden and house plants, while his background is mostly in lawns due to his career history working the grounds of golf courses.
"At one point I said, 'Oh yeah so my wife kinda looks after managing the inventory and I look after the financial side, payroll and all that and the lawn department,'" he recalled. Huge mistake… for whatever reason.
The vendor scolded him for being possessive and not calling his wife by her name.
The man wrote that the vendor got a weird look on his face and then had a bit of an outburst.
"'My wife. My wife. My wife.' You just keep calling her that," the vendor said. "It’s weird — like you own her or something."
The man asked the logical question most of us would ask in this situation: "Uh okay what am I supposed to call her?"
The vendor replied, "'Well, I call my wife Janet.'" Oh, brother. Well, good for you, sir. Did you have a point?!
Understandably, the man was nonplussed not only by the vendor's audacity but also because this was a downright stupid hill to die on.
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"I was like, uhhh okay well you’ve never met her so you don’t know her by name so I figured if I just started talking about Julia you wouldn’t know who I was talking about," the man said. Yes, that's correct, as befits THE NORMAL RULES OF HUMAN CONVERSATION.
Using the possessive 'my' is just part of how the English language works, and it's really not that big of a deal.
I'm sorry, but this is stupid. And I say that as a committed feminist! Saying "my wife" is not somehow indicative of a chauvinist view of your partner. It's just the way language works!
As the man put it in his post, "Whose wife is she? She’s my wife. Not your wife. Not her dad’s wife. That would be my mother-in-law. She’s my wife. My dad is my dad. The child that lives in my home and calls me dad is my son." Are these somehow slights against his dad and son? No!
As many commenters pointed out, "my" is used in English in all kinds of ways that don't imply possession, like "my religion" or "my hometown" — neither imply ownership of the municipality or, like, God in question. I repeat: This is stupid!!!
Making an issue of it is either being WAY too prescriptive about what constitutes sexist language or appointing yourself a card-carrying member of the Grammar Police, and both make you insufferable and rude. The only thing policing people's language accomplishes is making you sound like a pedantic windbag, especially because all languages, and English in particular, contain all kinds of rules that make no sense.
For example, why do we have the rule that you can't end a sentence with a preposition? "Who should I send it to?" is just as intelligible — if not more so — as "To whom should I send it?" So, what is the problem?
Well! It turns out some weirdly uptight 1600s scribes insisted English simply MUST adhere to the prepositional rules of LATIN. That's an entirely different language! That no longer exists! English isn't even a Romance language in the first place; it's a Germanic language! And sure, when you count all the French words in English, you end up with a language that is TECHNICALLY about 60% derived from Latin, but still. Shut up! This rule is dumb!
Language is among the most nuanced things in our world. If I were advising this man, I would have suggested he handle it similarly to how a childhood friend's dad handled it when his English teacher's wife scolded him about the preposition rule after asking where a restaurant was "at." He replied, "My apologies, darling. Let me rephrase: Where's that at, a-hole?"
That's the answer these sorts of things deserve! A person calling his wife "my wife" is fine; it doesn't imply possession, and we all know what the guy means. So why must we argue about this — especially since it's also nobody's business! Just sell him the dang trees and shut up already!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.