u/candy_peachyx

i was 6 when it started. my parents sold the house and most of what we owned and moved us onto a sailboat to travel the world full time, i didnt understand what was happening and to me it just sounded exciting because they sold it as the biggest adventure on earth. we lived on the boat from then until i moved out at 17.

the cruising world is small and you constantly meet other sailing families at anchorages who are in your life for two weeks then sail off and never come back and a new lot arrive in their place, my parents loved this and were always inviting cruisers onto our boat and a lot of those nights ended with me trying to sleep in a tiny cabin while strangers laughed and drank above my head.

my tenth birthday is the clearest one because we were anchored in the caribbean and a new boat came in that afternoon with people my parents had never met and they ended up at my party that evening, by ten my parents were on deck with the new arrivals and id gone to bed on my own. id come up from below most days and find people in our cockpit i had never seen before.

i always assumed this was just life because my parents told me i was lucky and other kids were jealous of me, i moved out at 17 to live with my grandparents on land and didnt think about any of it again until i started therapy last year for unrelated stuff and how i grew up came up and i started seeing it for what it had actually been.

a few weeks ago i visited and they told me theyre being interviewed for a documentary about families who sailed the world with kids and the producers want the children too, they specifically want me to say growing up on the boat hadnt messed me up because thats the angle. all my resentment came up and i said i couldnt because i wouldnt be able to say anything good.

my parents looked shocked because id never brought this up before and asked me why, and i ended up shouting that the truth is it did mess me up and that maybe they shouldnt have had a child if their number one priority was a boat.

my mum cried and my dad told me to leave. ive been shaken up all week and feel awful about my mum but also still angry. my dad sent me a text saying they were sorry i feel that way and could we talk soon and i cant make myself reply.

am i wrong?

When I was 22 my dad and I made a deal. Im 26 now, sitting on the other side of four years of work, trying to figure out if Im being unreasonable or if I have every right to be done with him.

A bit of context first. My family is comfortable financially but the rule growing up was that anything I wanted beyond basic needs I had to save up for myself. Im not complaining, I think it taught me a lot, but it meant a deal with my dad was always a big deal because gifts of any size were never really on the table.

The other thing about my dad is that hes always been a loopholer. If we played any game growing up he found a technicality to win and laughed about it for days, and any time I called him out he would say "life isnt fair," which drove me nuts as a teenager and still does.

At 22 I was finishing undergrad and talking about taking a year off before grad school because I was burnt out, and my dad pulled me aside with a deal. If I went straight into my masters in architecture and finished it with distinction, then worked at a real firm for two years straight without quitting or pivoting, he would contribute fifty thousand pounds toward the deposit on my first home. We shook on it with my mum as witness.

I did it, I went straight into the masters and finished with distinction, then took a junior associate role at a mid sized firm and stuck out the brutal first two years. I hit the two year mark.

A couple of weeks ago he told me he had something for me and to come over for dinner. I showed up to a wrapped box in the dining room, bigger than a shoebox but not by much. I opened it and inside was a beautifully built wooden dollhouse. My dad burst out laughing and said "a deals a deal, I said Id contribute toward your first home and here you go, paid for in full." My mum looked horrified.

I asked if he was serious and he said of course he wasnt giving a 26 year old fifty grand toward a flat, we could discuss a more reasonable amount when I was ready. I told him we already discussed a reasonable amount four years ago and shook on it.

His answer was "life isnt fair."

Ive barely spoken to him since.

AITA?

so my grandmother passed away about a year ago and she left me her engagement ring, which had been in the family for three generations. it was a simple but specific design that her own mother had picked out for her, six small prongs holding a single round diamond, with a particular twist detail that ran the whole way down the band. it wasnt financially valuable in any major way, but the design itself was the whole point, because three women in my family had worn this exact ring before me and i wanted to be the fourth.

the ring needed resizing because my grandmother had smaller fingers than me, and the band had worn thin in a couple of places after almost eighty years of being worn daily. i took it to a well reviewed local jeweller, brought photos of all three generations wearing it, explained at some length exactly what it meant to me, and asked them to resize and reinforce the band but otherwise keep everything else identical, down to the prong shape and the twist pattern.

i picked it up two weeks later, it looked beautiful, i wore it home, and i didnt look at it too closely for the next few months because honestly i was just happy to have it back on my finger.

last weekend i was at my aunts house and she pulled out an old box of photos from my grandmothers wedding and engagement. she handed me one and said look how similar it still looks, and that was when i actually looked at the ring up close against the photo for the first time. the prongs were different. instead of six small ones evenly spaced, they had used four larger prongs at slightly different angles, and the visual effect was just different enough to notice once you knew to look for it.

i went back to the jeweller on monday. they admitted they had changed the prong setup because in their professional opinion six small prongs on a diamond that old were going to keep loosening over time, and they didnt want to be responsible for me losing the stone. they said it was a judgment call to keep the ring safe for daily wear, and they hadnt mentioned it at handover because they figured i wouldnt notice or mind.

i lost it on them in the shop. demanded they redo it at their own cost or refund the work entirely. the owner came out and said they would do neither, because the workmanship was solid and theyd used what they called industry standard safer prongs. i left a few online reviews after that, factual but obviously not flattering, and now the jeweller is telling people in our small community that im an unreasonable customer and one of my own friends actually asked me yesterday if i had really made a scene over four prongs versus six.

am i wrong?

So six months in and things have honestly been really good between us. Same humor, similar vibe, I genuinely thought we were pretty much the same kind of person.

Then last week we got talking about places to eat and I asked if he had any favourites in the city he kept going back to.

Turns out there are five places he literally cannot go back to because he got banned from all of them.

I was like. sorry. five?? And he goes oh it sounds worse than it is. And I said no babe it sounds exactly as bad as it is.

Then he starts doing this whole negotiation thing. The first one does not count because the manager was rude first. The second and third were owned by the same group so technically one incident. I let those go. Fine.

We are down to three.

Then he gets his phone out and shows me a spreadsheet he has been keeping. Every restaurant, the reason he got asked to leave, whether he personally thinks the ban was fair, and then this column at the end that just says their loss.

He was showing it to me like he was proud of it. Like he thought I would be impressed.

I am sitting there staring at the their loss column and genuinely wondering what I have gotten myself into.

Am I wrong for finding this actually concerning?

My dad has been with his wife for about two years now and I have genuinely tried to make her feel welcome the whole time. I show up to dinners, I make conversation, I have put in the effort even when it was not always easy for me.

But for the past year he has been pretty consistently blocking my boyfriend from things. Comments about him not being family yet, complaints when I bring him to gatherings, showing up unannounced and making it obvious my boyfriend was not part of what they had in mind. Not every single time but enough that it was clearly deliberate.

A few weeks ago they showed up while my boyfriend and I were hanging out and the whole energy made it clear he was not welcome. He went out to give us space and I just went straight at my dad and asked him how he expected me to keep welcoming his wife when he was refusing to do the same for my boyfriend.

He said it was completely different because they were married. I asked if that meant I needed to get married for anything to change. He just kept saying it was different without actually explaining how.

His wife jumped in and said I had no business questioning her place in the family. So I told her that since we were apparently drawing the line at marriage then she would never be the grandmother of my future kids either, because my dad was making it pretty clear that being a long term partner counted for nothing.

AITA?

I run a small tattoo studio and have been doing it for five years. My booking policy has been the same from day one and it lives on the website, the booking form, and the studio wall. Custom work needs at least a week of lead time minimum and there are no exceptions.

Daniel has been coming to me for three years, tips well, refers people, and is genuinely one of my favorite people to work with.

Tuesday night he messaged asking if I could fit him in Thursday for a custom sleeve piece because he had a work event coming up and wanted something done before it.

I said no because I had a full book and more importantly I do not rush permanent work regardless of who is asking. A bad custom design lives on someone forever and I am not willing to put my name on something I did not have proper time to develop.

I offered him a slot three weeks out and he came back saying he expected more flexibility given how long we had worked together and how much he had spent with me. He said he would find someone who actually valued loyal clients and has not responded since.

My partner thinks I shouldve found a way to squeeze him in but I think rushing a permanent design onto someone just because they have history with me is not loyalty, it is a disservice to them and to my work.

AITA?

i share a resource with several other people in my building, and there are unwritten rules about how it works that everybody follows and its been fine for years

someone wasnt following those rules. i gave it more time than most people would have before doing anything, and then i acted on it in the most reasonable way available to me

they came at me immediately when they realized, like loud and rude with multiple expletives directed at me specifically. i stayed calm and explained what had happened and why id done what i did

they didnt accept the explanation and kept escalating, kept calling me names. i just kept responding calmly with the facts of the situation

then mid argument they threw out a personal circumstance. something real, something im not gonna dismiss as unimportant in general. but it was deployed at that specific moment as a way to make me back down and stop holding them accountable for what had actually happened

i didnt back down. i said something to the effect of that doesnt change what happened here or what you owe other people in this shared space

they went quiet for a second and then started crying, said one more thing, and left

they left a passive aggressive note after

i know the inconsiderate behavior was wrong and im right about that part, but the thing i said at the end, the direct comment about whether they were ready for their responsibilities given what had just happened, i keep wondering if that was a step further than i needed to take

AITA?