His Wife Has Massive Fears About His Driving, But He Keeps Laughing It Off Because He Thinks She’s Being Irrational

Matthew Gilligan

5 months ago

Source: Reddit

This drives me insane…

I’m talking about when passengers in cars freak out, yell, or cause any kind of scene that affects my driving.

Out you go!

And it sounds like the guy who wrote this story on Reddit is fed up with his wife’s antics.

But did he take things too far?

Let’s see what’s going on here…

AITA for refusing to validate my wife’s irrational fear?

“My wife and I have been together for over ten years, and when we’re driving together and I’m behind the wheel, sometimes she will shout, “Slow down!” out of nowhere, and then say, “Why are you driving so fast?” in a critical tone, as if the way I’m driving is obviously unsafe.

This sounds pretty annoying!

Usually I bite my tongue and slow down to placate her, but the thing is, the way I drive is not unsafe (driving since ’97, never got a ticket or in an accident).

My wife is generally a good driver, but much less experienced than me in snow and on gravel roads, and by her own admission she has some lingering driving-related trauma.

Yesterday she came home and told me that her car was making a rattling noise when she drove over bumps. We got into the car and I started driving down our driveway, which has plenty of bumps to hit (it’s gravel and loooong), and I was driving slightly faster than usual to hit them hard to try to produce the sound she was talking about.

Here we go again…

Suddenly, my wife yelled, “Slow down! Why are you driving so fast?”

I glanced at the speedometer and laughed, didn’t slow down, shook my head and said something like, “Are you serious? What are you afraid of?”

Her response was, “I’m afraid we’ll skid out and go flying off a cliff!”

Since that was physically impossible – we were going 25 km/h (15.5 mph) and there was no cliff in sight (let me remind you we were on our DRIVEWAY – the same one we have been driving up and down for the past five years).

I think I laughed and said words to the effect that she was being irrational. Predictably, she got mad at me for not “validating her feelings,” and I told her I wasn’t going to validate her irrational fear.

She didn’t ask me to let her out, so I kept driving and we survived the trip from the house to the road. Then we drove around for a while, listening to the car before going home, where my wife sulked for the rest of the evening.

I think it’s safe to say that she has some issues.

We argue very rarely, but today the driving thing came up. Again, I refused to validate her irrational fear.

We both got as worked up as we ever do – we’re pretty calm people, but voices were raised.

I told her how it annoys me when she yells at me to slow down, that it’s insulting, that her fear is like being afraid of monsters under the bed, and that maybe she needs therapy to get over it.

She said I’m the one with the problem because I get annoyed when she yells at me in the car, and maybe I need therapy to work on ways to not be annoyed by it, and that I should simply do what she says in order to validate her feelings, “the way you do for someone you love.”

Eventually we decided to end the discussion for the night because it wasn’t going anywhere positive.

AITA?”

Check out what folks said about this.

One reader nailed it.