Figuring out whether or not you want to spend the rest of your life with someone is one of life's toughest conundrums.
For many, the biggest potential deal breaker involves the question of children.
It's the weightiest decision many of us ever make, after all.
But what if your partner used your desire for children against you as a manipulative ultimatum in order to "test" your love? That's exactly what happened to a gent who wrote into Slate's "Dear Prudence" advice column and it left readers and Dear Prudence writer Danny Lavery alike with their mouths hanging open.
The story, titled, "Help! My Ex Dumped Me Because I Failed Her Utterly Bizarre 'Test,'" starts out with a common dilemma:
"Five years ago I broke up with 'Amy' because she couldn't have children. I felt awful about it, but having a family had always been important to me, and she wasn't interested in adoption or surrogacy right from the start. We just couldn't imagine a future where we were happy"
It's a heartbreaking quandary, but a common one.
Even if it hasn't happened to us personally, we've all known someone whose relationship came to loggerheads over the question of kids, and it's never easy. But imagine this gent's surprise when, some five years after they've split because she cannot have—and apparently does not want to have—kids, he runs into her at a farmer's market six months pregnant.
She tells him this:
"...she asked if I was a dad yet. When she found out I wasn't she said that this baby could have been mine if I'd passed her test. According to Amy she'd never been told she was infertile—she just wanted to see if I loved her enough to give up on being a dad. So she lied for over four months until we broke up."
Naturally, this encounter has left this guy reeling.
"I can't get over it...it just eats at me... I am just angry and frustrated. The fact that I felt guilty for years because of a lie makes me feel like an idiot. The fact that she came up with this out of nowhere makes me feel like I never knew her. Who does something like that?"
Even "Dear Prudence" writer Danny M. Lavery, who it's safe to say has seen his fair share of crazy stuff, was left in shock.
"This is unutterably bizarre... Of course you feel angry and frustrated. What Amy told you—which may have been true, and may have simply been a cruel jibe she invented on the spot in order to hurt you—was gratuitously brutal."
It's such a bizarre situation that Lavery can't really even come up with much advice for how to handle it.
"I think you may be chewing on this for a little while: It throws a really significant relationship in your life in a completely new light, and you shouldn't expect to simply shrug it off after a day or two... Give yourself a lot of time... and please do reach out to as many people as you possibly can."
After all, what else can you do when someone plays a trick this sick on you?
On Twitter and Facebook, though, people were a lot more pointed in their responses--and nearly none of them was Team Amy.
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Kj Heidelberg/Facebook
Max Arenstein/Facebook
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Though not everybody thought Amy was the villain.
Let's just say everyone's entitled to their opinion.
As for the guy Amy has left scratching his head, here's hoping he finds someone who's on the same page as him—and doesn't play crazy head games to test him out.
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