A woman is refusing to pay her friends back for a meal that she ordered by mistake during a dinner outing and that she let them take home so it wouldn’t go to waste.
The 20-year-old explained on Reddit’s “Am I the A——” forum on Feb. 14 that during the dinner with her friend and her friend’s boyfriend, both 20, she accidentally ordered a dish she was unable to eat.
When it came time to grab the bill, her friend and the boyfriend asked if they could take her uneaten meal home with them, which she noted “was barely touched.”
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“I said sure since I wasn’t going to eat it and it would be a waste otherwise,” the original poster (OP) said.
However, the OP said she was then “caught by surprise” a couple of days later when the boyfriend reached out and asked her for her portion of the bill — and it included the dish she did not eat.
The woman said she “explained this to him” and asked him to recalculate her total, which would amount to $20 less. She added that the boyfriend said he understood and did so accordingly but that it has since seemed as though the friends “weren’t very happy” and “have since refused to hang out.”
The Redditor wrote that she later explained the situation to a different friend and that the friend said she disagreed with the OP’s rationale, arguing that the other friend and her boyfriend were helping her avoid food waste.
“To be honest I still don’t really see how this was helping me as either way I wasn’t eating it,” the OP wrote, adding that she feels that taking the food was a “choice they made” for which they should be “accountable.”
“This feels like if someone ate your food and still asked you to pay for it. It’s not something I would do to anyone else and I don’t think it was wrong of me to voice my objection,” she continued.
“That being said, I feel bad at how the friendship fell apart over some dollars. AITA [am I the a——]? Should I have just paid [for] the full meal?” the Reddit user concluded her post.
The post quickly garnered a number of comments, with many Redditors declaring that they believe the OP is in need of a perspective adjustment.
“YTA [you’re the a——] – you ordered the dinner and made a choice not to eat it (the reason why does not matter),” wrote one person.
They continued: “You could have asked to take it home to give to someone else. You didn’t do that so presumably, the food would have gone to waste. Your friend is simply not wasting food that you didn’t want. You order it, you pay for it.”
Another commenter attempted to break the situation down even further in order to distill why they felt the OP was in the wrong.
“Let’s switch this up to a food truck,” they wrote. “OP orders, realizes they can’t eat it, and holds the box over the trash telling her companions that if they don’t pay for it she’s throwing it away. Obviously there’s a little more nuance since the intentions weren’t that obvious, but still,” they continued.
However, a number of commenters felt that both parties could have done better.
“But from the other point of view … did they [the friends] really need to add the extra $20 in for a meal they took home themselves? I feel like this is an ESH [everyone sucks here]. Either side should have been fine covering it without being asked, and either one could/should have suggested going 50/50 on it. But instead they both are making it into a bigger deal than it needs to be,” the person wrote.
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The same commenter did, however, concede that the extra $20 might seem like a lot to both the OP and her friends — especially due to their current stage of life.
“Then again they’re only 20 years old and who knows what their financial situation looks like. [That] could seem like a lot more to them if they’re in school and only working part time or something,” they added.
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