Husband Abandons Wife During Connecting Flight for Being Late - And The Internet Is Taking His Side

The original post has thousands of comments and provides a few surprising (and even tragic) plot twists -- particularly with an update he made after receiving overwhelming feedback.

At the heart of the post's popularity seems to be the conflict between the Redditor's self-proclaimed "very Type A" punctuality juxtaposed with his wife's reportedly "go with the flow and we will get there when we get there" attitude when it comes to travel.

While impossible to know the veracity of the account posted to Reddit, it is clear that the conflict was highly relatable to the thousands who weighed in on the debate.

(Sorry ahead of time for the length of this one, but there is a lot of key details I think are important) I know how this sounds, but hear me out. This is also not my usual account but I don’t want to risk my wife seeing this, as it is currently a sensitive subject.

My wife (female 43) and I (Male 47) have a daughter (Female 21) who goes to college out of state. We will call my wife Meg and my daughter Jess.

Jess is in her Junior year of college. Over the summer she was employed by her university and was able to stay in the dorms. After summer she was moving out of the dorms and into her own apartment off campus.

Meg and I live in the PNW (Jess goes to school on the east coast). We usually go to visit Jess a couple times throughout the semester, typically parents weekend and move out day. She also comes home during the holidays.

Let me start by saying that traveling with my wife is not a great experience. I am very type a, I like to have everything organized and make sure that we get where we need to be early, especially when traveling. My wife is the opposite, very “go with the flow” and “we will get there when we get there”. I do my best to meet in the middle, but not when traveling by plane.

Last year, during parents weekend Meg and I were going to fly out to see Jess. Our flight was at 10am. Our airport isn’t huge, but not a tiny airport either. I told my wife that we needed to be at the airport 90 minutes early, and we live about 30 minutes for the airports. This being said I wanted to leave at the very latest by 8, since we would also need to park and walk a little bit.

I of course got up at 6, to make sure everything was ready and accounted for. My wife does not like to get up early. It took me attempting to wake her up 5 times before she eventually got up at 740 then wanted to make coffee, shower, and eat a bowl of cereal … let’s just say that we didn’t leave the house until 9. It ended up being busier at the airport than normal (likely due to many colleges having parents weekend) and it took so long to get through security that we missed our flight.

Rightly so, the airline refused to refund our ticket. We were able to get new tickets but not until the next day and missed Friday afternoon and Saturday morning with our daughter. Jess was disappointed to say the least.

Fast forward to now. We were flying down for a long weekend to help her move. We take one flight from our town to a bigger town nearby, then fly from there to my daughter's college town.

Again it was a long morning of me pushing my wife getting her to move along. Due to the last airport mishap I wanted to make sure I told her we needed to leave extra early as to not miss the flight again.

We got there on time, with a bit of time to spare, and my wife was annoyed. Kept going on about how now we just have to sit and wait for 45 minutes for them to start boarding.

We took our first flight and landed in the connecting city, at a much larger airport. We only had about 1 hour layover. We got off the plane at 915 and our next plane started boarding at 940. We had to take multiple rails to get from where we landed to our terminal. We got to our terminal and had about 15 minutes until our plane was set to board.

My wife tells me that she wants to get coffee. There was a little market next to our terminal that sold hot food and coffee. I asked if she wanted me to go grab it for her. “No I want Starbucks” she said. Well Starbucks [was] a rail ride away, and a little bit of a walk. I told her we couldn’t do that, we didn’t have enough time. She stated that we had enough time and if I wouldn’t go with her she would go by herself. I tried to discourage her but she was determined. She walked away, at a brisk pace for her, and said she would be back in time.

15 minutes went by and she was no where to be seen. The started calling boarding groups, I called my wife hoping she was near by, she didn’t answer. They called a few groups, then called ours. In a panic I called my wife again, 3 times, finally on the last call she answered and said she was on her way, it was a long line and she had to wait a bit. I told her they were almost done with boarding and she needed to hurry up.

I waited by the gate but the attendant said they would need to shut the gate in 2 minutes. I waited and waited, but she didn’t show up. The attendant asked if I wanted to board, otherwise she was closing the gate. I tried to plead with her to wait a couple of minutes but she insisted that she couldn’t. So, I boarded the plane.

A few minutes later my wife calls me saying the the attendant won’t let her on, they had already removed the boarding ramp at that point. She told me I needed to tell them to let me off the plane to be with her and I said no. It is not fair to do this again to Jess, I said I told you we didn’t have time but you decided to go anyways. I told her to go purchase a new ticket for the next flight and I would see her when she arrives.

She got to Jess’s school and seemed unbothered by the whole situation, didn’t even really talk about it. I thought maybe she realized it was her fault and just wanted to drop it.

Boy was I wrong. We are now home and she hasn’t talked to me since the trip, over a week ago, and is insisting that I am an a--hole. So, am I the a--hole?

Wow, I know a lot of people say this but I really didn’t think this would get as big as it did. Thanks everyone for the responses. I have been trying to read them in batches when I have time, because I have been getting some good suggestions. I wanted to answer a couple questions I saw as well as add a bit of extra info.

For those who are outside of USA, PNW is Pacific Northwest.

As far as how she acts in other situations, she generally doesn’t have any issues. She is never one to be late to work or anything like that, or just seems like travel is her poor area. I never noticed things like this until we started traveling often to see our daughter. This is why I never considered ADD/ADHD, she really shows no other signs of this.

I saw posts implying that my wife might have an addiction of some sort, I’m not sure how that would line up but I don’t see that being a possibility.

I didn’t think the following information was important, but my daughter made a comment, and so did a friend that I discussed this with, so I thought maybe I would mention it here.

Jess is not Meg’s daughter. I was married [once] before and my wife unfortunately passed away due to complications during Jess’s birth. I remarried Meg when my daughter was 6. My daughter made a comment that Meg doesn’t like want to come to see/help her and that is why she is always running late, but I have offered to go alone and Meg was always very against that idea so I wouldn’t think that is the case.

One highly rated comment on the post said, "I stopped being the caretaker for my partner after the first time we missed a flight. Told him nope never again. Next two flights he missed and man he bitched. Explained again he’s a damn adult and has choices to make. The third time he missed a 10 day cruise. He’s never been late again. He’s pissed about it but listens to me and gets up and ready and out the door on time. Ohh and NTA."

While another, which garnered over 800 replies, said: "NTA she is disrespectful of other people's time, she believes that everyone should and can wait for her and she need to make no effort to meet time deadlines or to change because in her mind she is right. She is highly inconsiderate of the stress this has and will cause you and feels that you are in the wrong when you absolutely are not. Is it just in timekeeping that she is stubborn that it is her way or no way?"

While another commented on the update, simply saying: "Jesus Christ, mate. The update made it a lot worse."