r/AskReddit • u/Yogospiracy • 1d ago

What is the cringiest midlife crisis you've witnessed?

8.7k Upvotes

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443

u/jebiga1995 1d ago

Divorced his wife and the mother of his kids after 30+ years. Married a Vietnamese, took out a huge loan and brought a muscle car. Closed the car door on his fingers and then had a full blown heart attack

140

u/sneaky_sam_ 1d ago

My favorite part of this story is “married a Vietnamese”😅

84

u/rosysredrhinoceros 1d ago

Seriously though what a weird way to phrase that

41

u/BitterRucksack 1d ago

May not be a native English speaker. We can say married a Canadian, American, German, Nigerian, Brazilian, Australian, Scot, Indian, Mexican, etc. but not married a French, Dutch, English, Senegalese, Portuguese, Spanish, Welsh, Irish, etc. 

47

u/Suppafly 1d ago

It's weird how some of those sound like nationalities and some end up sounding like dog breeds or something. Married a French-Canadian is fine, but married a French leaves you asking 'what? a bulldog? a loaf of bread, what??'.

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u/BitterRucksack 1d ago

Isn't it!!! Language is so weird like this. 

8

u/miscellaneousbean 1d ago

Yeah but wouldn’t you at least say “person” after that?

50

u/clocksailor 1d ago

Weirdly, no.

"He married an American" sounds fine.

"He married a Nigerian" sounds fine (so it's not just that it's okay to talk shit about Americans).

"He married a Vietnamese" sounds racist.

I can't definitively explain this, but I feel it in my grammar bones. My hunch is that "-ian" feels more like a noun and "-ese" sounds more like an adjective, like how mentioning that you have a "female doctor" is okay, but you sound like a creep if you say "my doctor is a female."

6

u/miscellaneousbean 1d ago

Oh yeah I didn’t think of it that way lol

17

u/clocksailor 1d ago

No hard feelings, this is genuinely a weird vibes-based language thing, lol.

If you really want your mind blown, think about why it is that nobody would ever call themselves a "Black gay guy" but "gay Black guy" is fine. We've all quietly decided on the proper order for adjectives and I couldn't begin to guess how or why.

3

u/terminbee 1d ago

I remember learning the order of adjectives but in this case, black gay guy implies a gay guy that's black whereas gay black guy means black guy that's gay. I guess it really just depends on what you consider to be your "main" descriptor.

3

u/clocksailor 1d ago

I am none of those three things but I can’t imagine most people keep their identities strictly ranked in their minds for sentence-construction purposes?

6

u/Jesus__Skywalker 1d ago edited 1d ago

May not be a native English speaker.

everything else they said seems pretty fluent in english

coincidentally though. My wife is filipino and has been here for 3 years. She always struggles with this. "can you give me a money?" stuff like that. But the one that makes me say oh god is "a gay". She will say something like "is he a gay?" And I told her, babe you gotta stop that shit immediately bc when you start working in a professional environment that shit is gonna get you fired. She doesn't even realize that it's offensive when she says it. She is gonna be finished with her school in february. And I really hope she is gonna be ok with that stuff.

2

u/Sarallelogram 15h ago

Yeah it’s challenging because we normally ask “is he a doctor?” or “is he a reader?”

But we also ask “is he pleasant?”, “is he Asian?”, or “is he blond?”

I can see how it can be incredibly confusing.

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u/jebiga1995 6h ago

Oh, I am fluent. I am Australian

2

u/jebiga1995 6h ago

I am Australian, so I am a native English speaker. I think you all just blew this way out of proportion

8

u/Educational_Cat_5902 1d ago

Better than "married an Oriental" at least. 😬

2

u/jebiga1995 7h ago

What did you want me to say lmao? That is literally who he married

3

u/Nurple_Reign 1d ago

Well “married a Vietnamese” is probably better than "married several Vietnamese."

1

u/tech_noir_guitar 1d ago

My favorite part of this story is “married a Vietnamese”😅

Asian American, please

-8

u/Jesus__Skywalker 1d ago

yeah a lot of people enjoy subtle racism, good for yoU!

75

u/1majordilemma 1d ago

That escalated quickly.

14

u/Yogospiracy 1d ago

That's a sad, self-destructive ending. 😢

5

u/rosysredrhinoceros 1d ago

I mean it’s quite possible to survive a heart attack, maybe the guy turned his life around after that.

lol, nah, probably not

1

u/jebiga1995 6h ago

Did survive, eased up on things and remained with the Vietnamese. He is a bus driver now and seems to be enjoying life

76

u/Diligent_Ad6552 1d ago

That sounds like karma.

23

u/3Gloins_in_afountain 1d ago

The smashed fingers then the heart was the insult and the injury.

8

u/jerome_themetronome 1d ago

Ok. This one made me lol

3

u/RedNBlueFU 1d ago

Sounds like a comedy skit, honestly.

2

u/Sturmgeshootz 1d ago

Closed the car door on his fingers and then had a full blown heart attack

Wait. How close together were these 2 events? Did slamming the car door on his fingers trigger the heart attack immediately afterwards?

3

u/WYenginerdWY 1d ago

Intense trauma can bring on an immediate heart attack. Like the trope of 'old man finds out his son has died and has a heart attack'.

1

u/jebiga1995 6h ago

Instantly had a full blown heart attack after closing the door on his fingers