A Reddit user took to the platform recently to share a dating and dining etiquette issue, quickly garnering hundreds of comments on the topic.
“Earlier tonight I ordered a Hawaiian pizza with my boyfriend,” user “pizzagirlla” wrote on the AITA (“Am I the A–hole”) subreddit.
“We’ve only been dating a month, so it’s the first time I ate pizza with him,” the woman continued.
“We only finished about half, and then we went to watch TV,” the poster also said.
“I was still hungry, so I ate all the toppings off the pizza,” she added.
The Redditor said that when her boyfriend saw what she had done, he “absolutely flipped out.”
The woman added, “He said that he was saving it for lunch tomorrow, that he had never met anyone who would do anything like this and [he] was just generally really upset.”
The Redditor thought he was joking and “laughed it off” — but she noted that several hours later, he was “still upset.”
She added, “He’s talking about how he was looking forward to having the leftover pizza for lunch, and now I’ve ruined his lunch.”
She offered to buy another pizza, she continued, “but he kept saying that it wasn’t about that, and I just ruined his day.”
The woman then asked, “Is he overreacting or AITA?”
The Redditor added in a later edit, in part, “My bf [boyfriend] is calling me a ‘savage’ and ‘unreasonable’ because I don’t understand why that was wrong; I was just hungry.”
She also said, “I also wasn’t fully paying attention. I was just watching TV and eating it. I don’t know why he’s so upset.”
A college student from North Carolina said the man’s upset over pizza toppings showed that he was “being a baby.”
The student added, “If toppings on your pizza is going to ruin your day, you’re worrying about the wrong things.”
A mom of two in Massachusetts said that pulling off toppings from a pizza is a subconscious habit, for some.
“You’ve got to be careful with food,” the 34-year-old said.
“Eating meals can be pretty personal, and if you have been looking forward to that pizza all day, it can mean something when someone else destroys it!”
She continued, “My mom does this when we all get together for pizza; she will have a salad, saying she’s dieting, but [then] will take all the sausage and pepperoni off the pizza almost without realizing it.”
The woman added, “We have kidded her about this for years, telling her to stay away from the pie!”
Another woman — a mother of four in New York — said of the controversy, “The woman was just plain rude. They didn’t know each other well, and she just went ahead and ripped off the toppings. Claiming that she ‘wasn’t fully paying attention’ doesn’t cut it!”
On its website, Giordano’s Pizza, a restaurant chain with locations in nine states, dissected different personality types according to how people eat their pizza.
When it comes to pulling off toppings and cheese from the top of a pizza, the chain said of this personality type, “You’re a picky eater, or you know what you like … Perhaps you lost the toppings selection battle.”
The website added, “You also aren’t afraid to get what you want.”
Other Redditors flocked to the food issue, with people posting over 800 comments in eight hours; many of them decried the woman’s actions.
“It’s weird but also very rude,” one commenter said of the Redditor’s actions.
“Not only did OP [the original poster] eat also the [boyfriend’s] share without asking, which is bad on its own, but it’s also so wasteful because she didn’t even eat the pizza, just the toppings like some picky, entitled, spoiled toddler.”
That commenter continued, “It’s like if there was half a cake left over and someone proceeded to lick off the frosting and leave the now-ruined rest.”
The same commenter added, “It’s so, so wasteful and selfish, it’s infuriating. But also just unhinged.”
Yet another person commented, “I’m imagining her boyfriend in the living room watching TV while she excused herself to stand in the darkened kitchen, the only illumination from the open refrigerator door as she hunches over, picking pineapple, pepperoni and cheese out of the half-opened box and stuffing it in her face before he notices.”
The top comment, with 5.9k “upvotes” on the platform, read simply, “This is truly unhinged behavior.”