When you join a new family, some traditions can be hard to get your head around.

Maybe their holidays are different to yours, maybe they have decades-long in-jokes that you just can’t fathom.

Or maybe, like the guy in this story, it’s all a question of pride.

Read on to find out how, in unknowingly taking his future father-in-law’s prized title, this man inadvertently caused all kinds of drama in his girlfriend’s family.

AITA for beating my (25M) girlfriend’s (24F) dad (51M) in a hot-dog eating contest?

Six months ago my girlfriend invited me to a food festival in her hometown.

The day I arrived, I learned that there was a hot-dog eating contest and the prize would be an $100 gift card to a large tech retail store.

Being a casual competitive eater in college, I decided it would be a fun idea to enter and signed up on the website.

But this turned out to be his first mistake.

When I told my girlfriend’s family that I had entered the contest, her dad good-naturedly clapped me on the back, and said “let the best man win.”

Apparently, he had won the hot-dog eating contest for the last four years, and was somewhat expecting to win again.

Wanting the gift card, I decided to give the contest my all.

I ate a bunch of hot dogs – I wasn’t even paying attention to what I was doing.

By the time I was done, I’d eaten sixteen hot dogs in five minutes, beating my girlfriend’s dad, who only ate twelve hot dogs.

Read on to find out how his girlfriend’s family reacted.

When I was done, my girlfriend’s brother Liam (14) and a bunch of his friends mobbed me, calling me “The Doggler,” giving me high-fives and clapping me on the back.

They said that I had dethroned “The Doggler,” pointing to my girlfriend’s dad, and that I was the new “Doggler,” that I was a real “glizzied rizzler” (or something like that) and that I was just shoving “glizzy after glizzy down my gullet”.

They posed for pictures with me.

It was weird but kind of fun.

Let’s see how her father responded to losing the contest.

Later, my girlfriend’s dad came up to me, shook my hand, and said I was good competition.

He went home to do something in his woodshop, so I hung out with my girlfriend, Liam, and his friends, going around to various food stalls and games.

When we all ate dinner that night, the hot dog contest didn’t come up at all, except for when Liam kept referring to me as The Doggler and saying that he wanted to make a special Doggler shirt for me.

We had a nice breakfast the next morning.

No sign that anything was wrong.

But all was not as it seemed.

Today though, six months later, my girlfriend brought up in our argument that her dad was actually really wounded by losing the hot-eating contest, but just didn’t say anything to me.

I said that if I wasn’t supposed to enter the contest, then was it really a contest at all?

She said that it was less about the contest but about the special Doggler shirt (Liam made his dad a Doggler shirt for the years he won the contest, but I got the Doggler 2024 shirt).

She said that her dad only wanted to win the contest to connect with Liam and, if anything, I should be able to understand the masculine ego.

AITA?

It seems like his girlfriend’s dad has caused a whole lot of unnecessary drama here.

If he wanted to bond with his son, then that needs to be a year-round activity, not all hinged on a hot dog eating contest.

Would he have been upset if a stranger had beaten him, or was this all to do with it being his daughter’s boyfriend?

Let’s see what Reddit made of this.

This person agreed, pointing out that there was no way he could have known.

And others thought the girlfriend was being unreasonable.

Meanwhile, this Redditor gave some clear truths about the previous Doggler’s parenting style.

This guy was put in a really tricky situation.

Apparently undermining his girlfriend’s dad and wounding his pride – and not even finding out about it until six months down the line?

How was he supposed to know?

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.