There is no one-size-fits-all approach to being a good Samaritan or a decent neighbour. You simply do it when the opportunity arises. Some of such assistance, though, may be misunderstood. Read this story to know what happened between the husband and the neighbour and how he should explain it to his wife.
Source: Reddit
For context, I’m 37m, my wife is 39f, our neighbor is 31f and her kid is 4m.
My wife is away on a business trip until Friday. On Sunday morning (about 2 or 3 AM) I hear cop cars going down the street, when I look out my neighbor (she lives directly across the street) is outside holding her son talking to the cops. I went out there to see if she was alright and she told me she had woken up to someone in her house, she thinks whoever it was had the wrong address or didn’t think anyone was home because when she went downstairs once the person saw her they ran. They had broken in from a bathroom window, she was really freaked out and shaken up, her son was crying and fussing because he was scared and tired, so after the cops were done I offered her our guest bedroom because she kept saying how she was scared to go back to her house.
It was so early in the morning, and I didn’t even have my phone on me (my 13 year old kid had fallen asleep with it in his room since he needed one phone for playing a game and the other for FaceTiming his friend). I didn’t call my wife and tell her what happened, I went inside, set up our neighbor and her son and went to sleep. I entirely intended to call her the first thing in the morning (or text her if she was working) but I didn’t get the chance.
When I woke up the next morning and took my phone from my sons room she had called me 25 times and texted even more, saying she had gotten the notification of our neighbor coming in on the doorbell camera when she had woken up and asking me what was going on, accusing me of sneaking around, when I called her and explained the situation she was still mad, saying I shouldn’t have had another woman stay at our house without asking her first, that it was disrespectful to her. So, I’m in the middle of a sh*tstorm and need some advice on if I’m wrong? What should I do? Can I even do anything?
Few points to be noted:
- Our neighbor isn’t a stranger, we’ve known her for a long time, she’s been over our house before
- My wife wasn’t monitoring the camera, we both get motion alerts. She woke up to the motion alert on her phone from that AM.
- My wife does not sleep with her phone on. If I had called her or texted her (which I would’ve had to wake up my son to get my phone) she wouldn’t have gotten it until she woke up.
- Again for clarification- my wife saw the ring notification when she woke up the next morning. Not when it was happening. Meaning there was about an hour between her seeing the notification and me getting my phone back to call her.
- My wife and I are not still fighting over this.
- My son doesn’t often need two phones. He had been sick for a number of days (a big reason why I didn’t want to risk waking him) and hadn’t seen his friends. He wanted to play among us on one phone and FaceTime on another phone. I let it slide since he had been sick.
- My wife was aware my son had my phone and was going to use it that night to talk to his friends.
Here are a few comments on the story where it was originally posted:
