Woman upsets coffee snob friend after revealing her 'secret' favorite coffee brand.
It's normal and healthy to feel a sense of preciousness about your favorite things - whether they're hobbies, pieces of art, or food. But it's not healthy to try to gatekeep them from others in order to maintain your sense of identity.
After all, if your identity is intrinsically linked to an interest, then why would someone else's engagement threaten it? Sharing interests with friends can be expansive and fun for everyone, but only if you're willing to share.
In a popular post on the AITA subreddit, a woman asked if she's wrong for revealing her friend's 'secret' favorite coffee brand.
She wrote:
AITA for not letting a friend gatekeep coffee?
I was having coffee with some friends, we’ll call them Ash and Beth. Beth is a huge coffee person. She has several different kinds of coffee machines and has multiple different flavors and brands of coffee at her house. I happen to see the bag for the coffee she was brewing that day and recognized it as the Bones coffee brand.
While we were drinking Ash mentioned how much she loved the coffee and asked what brand it was. Beth replied it’s a brand she found that can only be bought online. Ash asked for the name again but Beth said she saw an advertisement for it on Instagram and she would just have to wait until she saw it herself. Ash who doesn’t really use social media was visibly agitated, so I told her it was Bones coffee.
She said thank you for telling me and the rest of the morning went by awkwardly. Later that day I get a text from Beth saying it was an a**hole move to tell her when she was trying to keep it a secret. She said coffee is her thing and she is allowed to want to keep something for herself.
I told her I don’t think Ash is all of a sudden going to become a coffee aficionado just from liking one flavor of coffee but Beth still insists I was in the wrong. I don’t see how telling a good friend the name of a coffee she likes makes me an a**hole but maybe there is something I’m missing.
Coffee drinkers a non coffee drinkers alike flooded the comments.
astroproff wrote:
There is a type of person who attaches their social stature, to how much unique, desirable information they can make others aware that they are withholding from them. Those people are a**holes. You, on the other hand, gave away the goods for free. A bit like a journalist. NTA.
Alarming_Reply_6286 wrote:
Hahahaha. Poor Beth. She gonna be pissed when she finds out coffee is also a billion other people’s thing. NTA.
Current-Read wrote:
What a weird thing to gate keep, I love tea have all different kinds of infusers and tea pots and if someone is like 'This tea is great!' I'm like 'It's this tea you can get it here!'. Because it's a freakin beverage not a collectable. NTA.
boooooooooo_cowboys wrote:
So uuhhhhh….this sounds an awful lot like marketing for Bones coffee.
Mountain-Instance921 wrote:
NTA.
Also Bones coffee is kinda trash, what a terrible coffee snob she is lol
Clearly Beth is TA here, and OP is NTA, and the whole situation is deeply immature.