Have you heard of the Waiter Rule? It’s essentially a personality test, and it involves watching how someone treats service staff in a restaurant. Whether that person is rude or kind to the servers tells you everything you need to know about their character.
So how would you feel if you went out to dinner with your partner’s parents for the first time and witnessed them all embarrassing the servers?
This 29-year-old man spent a bit more than three months dating his 28-year-old girlfriend. They originally were introduced through a mutual friend and went out on 10 to 12 dates before he got to meet her parents.
“She’s funny, she’s attractive, she’s a creative director at a small agency, and I had genuinely been thinking this could be something proper,” he explained.
“Last Saturday, she invited me to dinner with her parents at a really nice restaurant in town. They’d come up to visit for the weekend, and she’d been excited about us all meeting.”
“I dressed up properly, picked up a bottle of wine on the way as a small gift for them, [and] was looking forward to it. Things started off fine. Her parents are well-dressed, well-off, and her dad is a fairly high-up lawyer. They were polite to me, asked the standard questions, and the conversation flowed well at first.”
When the drinks and food began arriving at their table, he had an up close and personal view of his girlfriend and her parents that is forever seared into his brain.
The first incident involved his girlfriend being rude to the waitress for bringing out her appetizer before everyone else got theirs. It was awkward, but he tried to move on.
Next, his girlfriend’s dad sent his glass of wine back twice. The first time was warranted, as he was given a different red than what he ordered.
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But the second time, her dad complained about the wine being too cold. The waiter said he was happy to bring him a new bottle; however, his girlfriend’s dad made a joke at his expense and demanded tea instead.
“The waiter looked properly humiliated. Her mum corrected the waitress’s pronunciation of the menu items twice. Loudly. In front of the whole table. My girlfriend laughed both times,” he added.
After his entrée was placed down in front of him, he saw a little piece of garnish on it that wasn’t mentioned on the menu. His girlfriend picked it up and announced they will put anything on a plate to make it appear pricey.
The waiter was standing beside his girlfriend and just looked down at the floor. When it came time to pay the bill, his girlfriend’s dad spent four entire minutes double-checking everything they ordered with the waiter.
“He found one item where the menu had said one price and the bill had a different price (one quid difference). He made the manager come over and spent another five minutes lecturing him about consistency standards,” he said.
“The whole evening was like that. By the end of it, I had watched my girlfriend, who had been lovely to me for three months, deliver about twenty small unkindnesses to a string of people who couldn’t fight back.”
“She didn’t seem to notice she was doing any of it. It was just the texture of how her family interacted with the world. I walked her home. She said her parents had really taken a liking to me, and hopefully it had been a good night for me too. I said it had been lovely and I kissed her on the cheek.”
The following morning, he called up his girlfriend to say it was just not going to work out between them. His girlfriend got upset and wanted to know what had made him change his mind.
He replied that watching how rude she and her parents were to the servers made him see her in a different light, and he couldn’t get over it.
His girlfriend defended her parents as being old-fashioned. He pointed out that she had been problematic, too, and she promptly hung up on him.
He doesn’t think it was the dinner that changed his relationship; it was that his girlfriend’s mask slipped, and she had been pretending to be someone else for three months.
I am with him on this one; I could never be with someone who feels entitled to treating other people like trash, especially servers. It’s lucky he learned this after only a couple of months of dating his girlfriend, because his time wasn’t really wasted.
Some people really will tell you who they are through how they treat those they don’t feel the need to impress, and it’s important not to miss the signs.
Do you think he did the right thing, dumping her?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
