A young woman wonders if she did something wrong by telling her boyfriend’s pals that she makes twice his salary after they called her a gold digger.
The Reddit user began her post by sharing that she’s in a relationship with a guy who works in a similar sphere to her. He’s doing programming at a large company and makes $68K, and she’s a mechanical engineer at a robotics start-up, where she earns $130K.
One day, her boyfriend brought her to a party where she had the opportunity to meet his friends. The guy’s pals work in tech too and mostly talked about their jobs before moving on to the author and asking her about herself.
Instead of talking about her profession when they arrived at the party, the young woman decided to cover her hobbies.
She told them that she’s a hiker, does archery, loves road trips, camping, and riding dirt bikes – however, this didn’t stop one of them from wondering about her career.
The lady said she avoided the topic and insisted that she didn’t want to talk about work, as she’d spent her whole day sweating her bottom off trying to replace a busted motor.
The young lady explained that she wasn’t trying to downplay that she has a good job but she simply wasn’t in the mood to talk about it.
According to her, some other conversations came up that made her seem poorer than her boyfriend. She said that car dealership repairs are a rip off and also mentioned how her childhood neighbor’s trailer caught on fire and that she was planning to visit and help her out.
Even though she wasn’t doing it on purpose since she was just talking about her life – yet, for some reason, her boyfriend’s pals assumed that she was not too well off.
As everyone got drunker, her boyfriend’s buddies started to loosen up and began making jokes about her growing up in a trailer and being a gold digger that was ready to “jump to a richer guy” – a case of some toxic misogyny, basically.
The thing is, this young lady’s partner didn’t defend her. He later justified it by saying that he’d smoked too much, which made it hard for him to engage in the conversation – but the woman noted that she was hurt by his friends statements regardless.
Naturally, the incredibly out-of-place accusations had her worked up, so she asked the men why would they say such a thing when she makes twice what her boyfriend makes.
As expected, everyone got really quiet, yet the woman continued and said that there was no gold to dig not from him or anyone else at the party.
Her boyfriend wanted to leave shortly after that, as he was upset that his friends now knew that he was making way less than her – however, the woman said that she’d have held her tongue if he had stood up for her in the first place.
The guy said that it was humiliating and embarrassing, whereas the woman is angry that she had to say anything at all since it was supposed to be him who should have called his friends to order and put them in their place.