Wife Asks What To Do After Her Husband Snaps His Fingers At Their Cleaning Lady & Calls Her A 'Servant'
She can't get through to him how inappropriate and offensive his attitude is.
AlexandrMusuc | Shutterstock It's probably one of the most uncomfortable feelings a person can have — you think you really know someone, and then something reveals their true colors, and you're left wondering if you had it wrong all along.
That's the situation a woman on Reddit found herself in after she and her husband hired a cleaning lady for their house, and it brought something out of her husband she'd never seen before.
Her husband snapped his fingers at the cleaning lady and called her a 'servant,' leaving his wife appalled by his actions.
Treating the people who work in our homes or in restaurants and shops as merely "the help" has fallen so out of favor in recent years that it's become a red flag for assessing someone's true character.
We all have that friend, for instance, who blocks a guy or gal they've gone on a date with the minute they're rude to a waiter, right? It says something about who a person is. So imagine how disorienting it is to be in a 13-year relationship with someone who, out of nowhere, turns out to be this way.
The Redditor and her husband recently hired a house cleaner, named Beth, and while the wife and Beth immediately got on like a house on fire, her husband kept his distance. The woman didn't think much of it until she came home one day to find his demeanor had changed drastically.
She was mortified to find him snapping his fingers at the house cleaner and refusing to call her by her name.
"I came home from work one day to catch my husband clicking his fingers at her," the wife wrote in her since-deleted Reddit post, adding that she was "so shocked and embarrassed" that she began scolding him. She told him that "he could just as easily say her name if he wanted to speak with her."
She explained in her post that while she and her husband are from the U.K., neither come from the kind of upper-crust background that tends to foster snobbish attitudes toward service workers. She'd never even seen her husband be rude to a waiter in all the years she'd known him.
But something had obviously changed because he looked furious that she'd corrected him. Even worse was how uncomfortable the situation made Beth. "She seemed equally as awkward," the wife wrote, "but remained very professional (much more than I would) and said politely that she agreed with me."
Her husband simply left the room and refused to discuss it further. "I was honestly mortified and apologized countless times to Beth, who was very nice about it," the wife wrote.
For her part, Beth was understanding and forgiving, but that was far from the end of the drama.
Her husband insisted that what he did was how you're supposed to address 'servants' and was furious that his wife 'humiliated' him.
"That night after Beth left, my husband got angry and told me I had humiliated him," she admitted. She was having none of it and told him he'd been "wildly rude and disrespectful."
His response was shocking. "'That's how you're meant to summon servants,'" he told her.
"I was disgusted — our 13-year-old would never say anything like that," she wrote. She was even more offended because her mother had worked as a house cleaner for years. "I immediately wondered if he'd viewed her as a servant too."
She made him promise to apologize, but he has refused to do so, and she can't get through to him about how wrong this all is. It's left her wondering what to do about the situation.
Experts say mistreating service workers is an unfortunate part of human nature that many people feel is justified.
It's not just your imagination — attitudes like this husband's and the incidents of abuse toward workers that come with them have become more common since the pandemic. And experts like psychologists say there are pretty simple explanations for it.
For starters, unloading frustration on someone perceived to be beneath you in a power structure — like a homeowner and his housekeeper, for instance — is an easy way to blow off steam that some people simply find irresistible.
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But not just irresistible — many view it as normal, the sort of natural order of things. This is why many people will behave like this toward a housecleaner or a waiter but not their spouse or friends who they view as on the same level as them.
Psychologists also say it can be a way of managing stress via scapegoating. If a service worker has disrupted your day and schedule, for instance, it's easy to become stressed about the way things are now shuffling around, and scapegoating the service worker "at fault" feels like a natural way to deal with it.
The difference, of course, is that we've all felt this way innumerable times in life, but only some of us actually act on it. Psychologists say most of us feel guilty when we do. The fact that this woman's husband feels no remorse whatsoever is… well, red flag behavior to say the least.
"Sounds like husband has a chip on his shoulder from not growing up privileged and is taking it out on Beth because he is now in a position where he can," one Redditor astutely suggested. "Tell him to knock [it] off," another added. "You did not humiliate him, he humiliated himself!" It's hard to argue with that.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.