My fiancee is furious at me for telling my family to start eating Christmas breakfast without her, AITAH
Every year we have a family Christmas breakfast as part of our celebration, and this year it was organised for 11:00am. My partner was aware what time it was planned for, but was running almost 2 hours late. I told my family to go ahead and eat (as they had spent the morning preparing and cooking everything), and said I would eat with my partner when she arrived.
However now I’m completely in the doghouse for excluding her from breakfast, and that I’m an asshole for inviting her if they weren’t even going to wait.
My opinion is that it’s unfair to punish everyone for one person’s poor time management, but I’m curious if I’m the jerk here or the logical one?
“AITA because I hate that my BF’s family Christmas dinner schedule?”
So, we’re just leaving my BF’s parents house after Christmas dinner and I got in a bit of a fight with him because I said I don’t want to eat Christmas dinner with his family again next year.
They’re all nice enough people and we all got along just fine, but my problem is literally the pace of the meal. We sat down at the table at 2pm and didn’t get up until 7pm!!!
There were a bunch of courses and ALOT of time in between each course where I felt trapped and antsy trying to make awkward small talk with everyone at the table. Don’t get me wrong, each course was nice food and I complimented his parents on each thing, but each dish felt a little more pretentious than it needed to…
And I was just hungry and wanted to eat a MEAL, not just a bunch of small bites until 3.5 hours into dinner when the beef and potatoes finally came out.
Every family gathering I’ve ever been to before (my family or friends) has had a pretty typical format: show up at invited time, help hosts get dinner ready, put everything out on the table, and everyone sits down at eats it all at once, or maybe dessert comes a little later.
Then you’re free to get up from the table and go outside or go for a walk or move to a couch to continue socializing with specific people, etc. You get your belly satisfied at once and have a lot of opportunities to have conversations with different people there.
At his family meal it was like all of us were just trapped in our chairs for 5 hours making small talk with everyone and the bulk of the conversation stayed really shallow as it does when it’s a 12 person convo the whole time.
I found it excruciatingly uncomfortable from both a hunger standpoint and a social standpoint and couldn’t wait to escape. He says it’s just normal for his family to eat that way and doesn’t understand why it made me so antsy.
His grandparents were European so I guess long course dinners are more common there. Also there was a wine pairing with every course, and by the end the drunk uncles were getting kinda loud and sloppy.
When it was all over and we could finally get up from the table I felt like my prison sentence was over and I had my freedom back. I was honest with my bf in the car when we left.
I told him that next year I’d just like to do Christmas dinner with my own family or I can just pretend I’m sick or something if we’re still in his family’s hometown then. He says I’m being a bitch. I was polite to his family, I only told him privately that I hated it.
I don’t know if it’s a blood sugar thing or an expectations thing or what… But AITAH for my opinions here and telling my bf my honest thoughts? Anyone else hate long drawn out dinners? What should I do next time?
