Being passive-aggressive and snarky automatically makes you a jerk in my mind, so to me, u/cacadodohead can’t even have a story that remotely removes the assholery from his question: “AITA for shutting down conversation and staying quiet when my wife constantly tells me I’m being too loud?”
OP says that he’s a loud talker. Fine, I guess.
Occasionally when we are at a restaurant and I am fully invested and excited at everything she is telling me, I tend to project my voice. I talk loud but not obnoxiously loud: the table next to us might hear me if they are paying attention but no one else could.
But his wife really didn’t care for it; she would stop him and tell him that he was being too loud. OP would get mad.
She would stop me mid conversation and say: “ you are talking to loud.” This makes me mad because it seems like she assumes everyone is worried about our table when in reality everyone is talking amongst their own tables and would never register our conversation.
Instead of telling her what he writes here, that he feels it means she’s not listening to him, he just… clams up and gets quiet?
It makes me mad because it seems she is hyper focused on my loudness rather then our conversation. Just because she can hear me and I am talking towards her direction doesn’t mean everyone else can hear me.
God, what a dingbat. He just clams up and decides not to talk.
When she says I’m too loud, it drains all my energy to continue a conversation and I just go quiet after that. I stop being fully involved in the conversation and just stay quiet until we go home. AITA for shutting down and deciding not to talk?
Reddit, predictably, could not stand this guy.
“YTA. You gotta use your inside voice. You’re probably louder than you think,” wrote one person.
Another was a little more gentle. “My husband and I had this exact situation. He would get excited and just so loud it made me very uncomfortable. He honestly didn’t think he was being that loud, but he was. We ended up finding out that he had a bit of hearing loss from being in the military. Not saying this is your case, just that if you really don’t think you are loud and your wife really does; it might be something to consider.”
Others were the guy! They mentioned that they’re the same way and have had to learn to curb themselves, “YTA. I tend to be loud too. It’s because I came from a large family (6 people). I would rather be reminded about getting loud so I could learn to use my “inside voice”, than getting naturally louder and louder and YES it does piss other customers (and employees) off when one person is particularly loud. They want to enjoy their conversations.”