Plastic straws have been a bit of a point of contention lately. With bans hitting cities all across North America, everyone seems to have an opinion on whether or not plastic straw bans are necessary.
Which is what led to this whole debacle. One guy’s love for plastic straws ended up in a feud between himself and his roommate’s new girlfriend, which he posted on Reddit’s AITA community for everyone to weigh in on.
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It all starts out pretty normally.
Because of his distaste for the paper straws — he even named his Reddit account paperstrawssuck — that his city is phasing in to replace the plastic variety, he took matters into his own hands, stating, “I opted just to order a box of individually wrapped plastic straws so I can leave them in my car for whenever they’re needed.”
But don’t worry, he still recycles.
He clarifies that the straws he bought are biodegradable and still much less impactful on the environment than throwing regular plastic away.
With the straws in his car, he goes to pick up his roommate, along with his roommate’s girlfriend.
“She has issues sitting in the back seats of cars, so she sat in the passenger seat.” Since she doesn’t have a car and his roommate can’t drive, paperstrawssuck does them a favor by picking her up.
Again, nothing out of the ordinary so far.
But everything changes after a trip to the coffee shop.
They go to a Tim Horton’s (the Canadian equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts) and order ice coffees. Again, pretty normal.
That is, until he asks the girlfriend to hand him a straw from the glove compartment: “she briefly gave me a confused face, but still did it.”
Suddenly, things get heated.
“She started going off about how I don’t care about the environment, and I’m a baby for simply just using plastic straws,” he recounts. He also recalls telling her that they’re biodegradable.
As if this isn’t uncomfortable enough, when he stops for a red light, she throws the package of straws out the window! “I looked at her like wtf, if she cared so much about the environment, isn’t this directly going against that?”
Now somebody has to pick the straws up.
Paperstrawssuck demands that either the girlfriend or the roommate picks up the straws. She refuses, causing him to stop the car and demand again, this time adding that if he has to do it, they both have to get out of the car and walk.
“[The roommate] turned to his girlfriend and asked her to pick them up, she again refused, so he just got out of the car, and picked up the box, and got back into the car. Luckily the box didn’t break open.”
He then bans the girlfriend from their apartment.
They have a rule that both of them have to like any guests they try to have over, and since the girlfriend disrespected him, he no longer wanted her there.
Now he’s wondering if he’s the asshole in this situation.
The roommate later talks to paperstrawssuck about what happened. He “apologized for his girlfriend’s behavior, and called me an asshole for banning her.”
But is he really the asshole here, or is his reaction justified?
Commenters weighed in on the situation.
Both in the original thread and on Twitter, people had a lot of opinions about what had happened.
“But yeah, OP, you’re definitely not the AH here. This girl is unhinged and super disrespectful. If she cared about the environment she wouldn’t have littered, she was just concerned with being right/getting her way and you’re right to call that red flag and draw a line,” one comment says.
Other people think they’re both in the wrong
Overall, the consensus is that his anger is justified. But some people think that him banning the girlfriend from the apartment may have been a bit of an overreaction.
There’s definitely a lot to this debate.
Whether or not you support plastic straw bans is one thing, but does that kind of thing justify how either party reacted here? Would you have done the same thing, or is paperstrawssuck out of line, too?
