A listener wrote in asking if she is the a-hole for not inviting her sister to her wedding, but is the reasoning justified? Learn more about Innovation Refunds at bit.ly/3LEwYnO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| All right, it's, uh, Am I the Asshole Day on the Matt Walsh Show. | |
| We've got a couple, uh, submitted questions from the Sweet Baby Gang, and then we're gonna go to Reddit and look at some from there for them. | |
| From Trailblazer says, Hello, Sweet Daddy Matt. | |
| When I was, uh, younger, my best friend lived next door and we hung out all the time. | |
| As we got older, however, he started to act less Christian and started to feel like a bad influence. | |
| I grew up homeschooled in a Christian family while my friend was public schooled. | |
| The older we got, the worse he seemed to behave. | |
| When we were eight years old and an adult wasn't in the room, he'd swear like a sailor and talk trash about my sister. | |
| Whenever I told him not to talk like that, he'd throw a fit and storm home. | |
| Something else he'd do was try and show me inappropriate YouTube videos with non-stop cursing and inappropriate jokes. | |
| After a while, I decided that I was fed up and I wasn't going to deal with him anymore. | |
| I stopped hanging out with him eight years ago, and we've never spoken since. | |
| Some people thought that it wasn't Christian-like to ditch a friend like that, but I felt that it was the right thing to do. | |
| He seemed like a stumbling block in my relationship with God. | |
| What do you think? | |
| Was I overreacting, or did I make the right choice? | |
| Am I the a**hole? | |
| Well, you certainly made the right choice. | |
| The people criticizing you, do they think that you owe lifelong friendship to this guy? | |
| Like, you're tethered to him forever because you happened to hang out when you were kids? | |
| Like, the fact that most people I don't know how old you currently are, but most people don't remain friends with the people that they knew early in childhood their whole lives. | |
| I mean, there are a few examples. | |
| There are some friends of mine who I've known since elementary school. | |
| It's, it's uncommon. | |
| It generally, like the vast majority, let's put it that way, 99.9% of everybody who you considered a friend or, you know, a friendly acquaintance anyway, in your elementary school, middle school years, even high school, you're not going to continue relationships with them. | |
| Part of the reason is that You know, when you're a kid, friendships are, first of all, it's built, a lot of it is built around just sort of like, there's a certain element of kind of default to it. | |
| You're friends with somebody because they live next door, or you went to the same school, or you went to the same, you're in the same class, you kind of bond over. | |
| It doesn't take much, it doesn't take much for kids to bond. | |
| I mean, I have, you know, my kids will, they'll go to the playground and, and I have this conversation all the time with my, with one of my kids. | |
| They'll say, oh, I made a friend at the playground. | |
| And then I'll say, oh, really? | |
| What was their name? | |
| Uh, I don't know. | |
| So they make a friend without even knowing the person's name because for them friend just means like you both are going down the same, you both are playing on the same jungle gym or something and you talk to each other, not your friends. | |
| You like cherry soda? | |
| I like cherry soda! | |
| We'll be best friends! | |
| Which is great, you know, it's one of the wonderful things about childhood innocence is that you can make friends that way but What that means is that as you grow older, you're going to find that just because you're friends with this person doesn't mean that you have any kind of values in common. | |
| And so it's very easy to grow apart at that point. | |
| And as you get older, you know, you can't be friends with someone anymore just because you were both on the same jungle gym. | |
| It's like you need a little bit more to maintain that friendship. | |
| You need to have some basic values in common, just something there. | |
| Certainly a shared sense of respect is necessary to begin with. | |
| No, this is just a natural progression of things and nothing to be concerned about. | |
| Okay, from Danielle says, I'm not inviting one of my sisters to my wedding. | |
| To make an extremely long story short, I got a temporary restraining order against my ex-boyfriend because he was stalking me, i.e. | |
| showing up at my work, following me to the beach, breaking into my house while drunk and coming into my bedroom at 2 a.m. | |
| At the hearing to make the TRO permanent, I submitted evidence of the harassment, text messages including him admitting to coming into my house, eyewitness statements, etc. | |
| and he submitted witness statements attesting to his character as well as a character assassination of me from my sister who doesn't know him at all, claiming that I do this to all my boyfriends. | |
| I dated her friend for a period which I ended due to sexual abuse, as well as claiming that I'm a far-right extremist liar. | |
| The judge in liberal California decided that my sister's statement outweighed all my evidence and denied me a permanent restraining order. | |
| I have not talked to my sister since then. | |
| I have since met my fiancé and am planning our wedding. | |
| Am I the a**hole for not inviting my sister to the wedding? | |
| Well... | |
| Based on all the information you've given me, and assuming that everything you've told me here is correct, which I have no reason to think that it isn't, no, you're not the a-hole for not inviting your sister to the wedding. | |
| I'm sure you realize, though, that not inviting a family member, especially an immediate family member, to your wedding is... | |
| One of the most dramatic statements you can make about a relationship, and the statement you're making is that the relationship is over. | |
| So there's no coming back from this, as long as you realize that. | |
| There's no coming back from it. | |
| Maybe like 30 years from now or something, you guys could try to repair these broken bonds, but in the near term and short term and even, you know, the immediate long term, there's no repairing it. | |
| This is like a severing of the relationship. | |
| But I would say, based on the information you've given me, it's not really you who severed the relationship. | |
| She did that. | |
| Because, look, there are plenty of cases where men are unfairly accused of, you know, of being, of harassing and all the rest of it. | |
| They're being unfairly accused. | |
| They're being falsely accused. | |
| But in this case, if this guy's breaking into your house, In the middle of the night and coming into your bedroom. | |
| I mean, this is like, this is criminal activity. | |
| This is, of course you should feel unsafe around this person. | |
| This is like, this to me goes beyond, this goes far beyond harassing. | |
| This is like actual breaking and entering and physical intimidation inside your own house. | |
| Like, really you should be going to jail for that. | |
| But if that's not going to happen, then a restraining order is the least of it. | |
| And the fact that she would side with the other guy, potentially putting your safety at risk, Is pretty extreme. | |
| So that's already an extreme kind of severing of the relationship. | |
| It's already happened. | |
| And all you're doing, I suppose, by not inviting her to the wedding is kind of codifying that. | |
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| All right. | |
| Then we go to Reddit. | |
| My son is 18 and will graduate from high school in a few months. | |
| Lately, he's been fighting a lot with my wife and I. My wife isn't his biological mother, but she's been his mom since he was 3. | |
| A week ago, they got into a big fight, and my wife got frustrated and yelled at him that she wasn't his mother. | |
| Since then, he's been completely cold to her, and when he does have to address her, he does so by her first name. | |
| My wife confiscated the keys to his car last night, but I gave them back this morning because he didn't curse at her, he just called her by her name. | |
| Besides, I don't want to drive all the kids to school and then pick them up. | |
| My wife is upset and said I need to support her and talk to him. | |
| I think it's pointless. | |
| He's 18. | |
| If he doesn't want to call her mom, we can't really make him. | |
| My wife says that I'm being a lazy asshole that just doesn't want to have a conversation with him. | |
| Maybe I am an asshole, but I did talk to him. | |
| He said he's not going to call her mom again, ever. | |
| But what am I supposed to do about it? | |
| Even if we find a way to force him to, he's going to school at a state, so what do we do then? | |
| Just seems like a pointless battle that will only create more animosity, but maybe that's just what a lazy a**hole would say. | |
| Obviously not the a**hole in this case. | |
| We talked about, just a second ago, There are things you can do in a relationship that severed that relationship and there's no coming back from them. | |
| And sometimes it's not even something you do. | |
| It can be something that you say, you know. | |
| Most of the time, people in relationships and family dynamics, you know, you can get angry and say something you regret and apologize for it. | |
| And there might be some hurt feelings and there may be some emotional injury that happens, but it can be healed and repaired. | |
| But there are, you know, there are things that you can say And even though they were just words, you can't come back from them because you've expressed something that you actually think. | |
| And the other person is not going to be able to just forget that you have revealed this thought. | |
| And this would be one of them. | |
| Having your mother, who's maybe not your biological mother, but is your mom, say to you, I'm not your mother. | |
| Yeah, that's one of those things. | |
| He's never going to forget that. | |
| Ever. | |
| He will never forget that. | |
| He'll be 70 years old and he'll still think about that. | |
| And it forever changes that relationship. | |
| There is no coming back from it. | |
| Consequences for your actions. | |
| You said that you're not his mother. | |
| Now he's going to call you by your first name. | |
| It's going to forever alter that relationship. | |
| That's consequences. | |
| Reap what you sow. | |
| F-A-F-O, as the kids would say. | |
| Finally, am I the a**hole for criticizing my roommate's grooming habits harshly? | |
| Hey all, I currently live in a rented apartment with my roommate. | |
| Recently, we've been running into some issues because of his grooming. | |
| I occasionally notice a funk coming off of him, and a few times it got bad enough to ask him to take a shower because it was distracting me and grossing me out. | |
| He apologized and said he had a lessened sense of smell, which made him less likely to realize he needed a shower. | |
| Sounded kind of BS to me, but he showered, so I didn't think anything of it. | |
| Our apartment has two full bathrooms in the hallway and I ordered a bidet for mine. | |
| The other day I was installing it and he happened upon me doing it. | |
| He asked what it was for and I explained. | |
| He chuckled and said, you gay guys are something else. | |
| I laughed and said, it's less invasive than toilet paper and more effective. | |
| He laughed and said, yeah, but I don't use that either. | |
| What? | |
| Something clicked in my head and I asked for clarification. | |
| Apparently he never wipes. | |
| Why am I reading this? | |
| He says he thinks it's gross to rub his ass with a piece of paper that doesn't really do anything. | |
| He said no straight guy does, and it's not a big deal. | |
| I, uh... Okay. | |
| So, the a-hole here is, uh, is the roommate for not practicing basic human hygiene. | |
| It's also this other guy for telling us about this. | |
| And it's also my producer McKenna for sending me this, in my The A-Hole submission in the first place. | |
| So, a lot, there's a lot of A-Holes involved. | |
| Uh, in this particular story, and we're just gonna, um, stop there. | |
| I can't even, it goes on, it actually goes on for like another five paragraphs, this whole, if you want the whole saga of this guy not wiping himself, you can go to Reddit and find it. | |
| But, uh, you're not gonna hear it from me. | |
| All right. | |
| Talk to you tomorrow. |