'AITA for encouraging our friend group to stop visiting a friend because she's vegan?'
"AITA for encouraging our friend group to stop visiting a friend due to their house rules"
Prestigious_Page_129 writes:
There is a person in our friend group who usually hosts us at her place for weekly drinks. She recently became very active in the vegan community and promotes her views a lot. We don’t mind it too much, although she can be annoying at times.
We usually do BYOB for the weekly drinks, and we’ve never had any incidents or problems. I think we’re quite considerate guests, and she enjoys hosting people, so it was all fine until a month ago when she suddenly lashed out at another girl in the friend group for bringing a bottle of Baileys to the weekly drinks.
She was bluntly rude to the girl and made her pretty uncomfortable because "I don’t want any dairy in my glasses, no matter how much you wash them after." We were like, "Okay, whatever, your glasses, so you get to decide," but afterward, I asked everybody if they’d prefer me to host from now on. Everyone was uncomfortable about the situation, and we decided that I’d be hosting instead.
It’s been a month since then, and the original host (OH ?) seems quite upset. I think she really enjoyed her role as a host and valued it quite a bit. So, I don’t know—wondering if that seemed like a good decision. On one hand, she has the right to set the rules in her place, and she’s upset now. On the other, it seemed really petty, and the rude reaction was over the top.
OP responded to a few comments on the post.
lady-scorpio-45 writes:
She learned a hard consequence for her insanely rude behavior. That’s on her. What did she think was going to happen? People would happily return to her house? I understand your discomfort now because she’s upset but it’s not like you dropped her as a friend.
If she wants to host again sometime, she should apologize for how she behaved. I’ve been a vegetarian for 14 years and I just can’t tolerate people being rude to others because they don’t have the same dietary lifestyle.
OP responded:
Thank you! Our group is all non-vegetarian so I was really keen to get independent feedback from some members of the community to better understand her perspective.
Aikie_Allure says:
She didn’t want dairy in her house, and y’all didn’t want drama in yours. Fair trade.
OP responded:
I agree from a purely individualistic viewpoint, but I think IRL people are expected to be more empathetic and consider not only whether something is “correct in theory” but also what emotions it causes. So kind of trying to weight whether we needed to be more understanding or she should have made concessions on her part.