A Reddit user recently took to the platform to share a dating and dining etiquette issue, quickly garnering hundreds of comments on the topic.
“Earlier tonight I ordered Hawaiian pizza with my boyfriend,” user “pizzagirlla” wrote on the AITA (“Am I the asshole”) subreddit.
“We’ve only been dating for a month, so this is my first time having pizza with him,” the woman continued.
“We only got about half done, then we went to watch TV,” the poster also said.
“I was still hungry, so I ate all the toppings on the pizza,” she added.
The Redditor said that when her boyfriend saw what she had done, he was “completely freaked out”.
The woman added: “He said he was saving it for lunch tomorrow, he had never met anyone who would do something like this and (he) was generally very upset.”
The Redditor thought he was joking and ‘laughed at it’ – but noted that several hours later he was ‘still upset’.
She added: “He talks about how he couldn’t wait to have the leftover pizza for lunch, and now I’ve ruined his lunch.”
She offered to buy another pizza, she continued, “but he kept saying 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 boyfriend (boyfriend) calls me ‘savage’ and ‘unreasonable’ because I don’t understand why that was wrong; I was just hungry.
She also said, “I wasn’t fully attentive either. I was just watching TV and eating. I don’t know why he’s so upset.
A North Carolina college student said the man’s displeasure with the pizza toppings showed he “was a baby”.
The student added: “If your pizza toppings are going to ruin your day, you’re worried about the wrong things.”
A mother of two from Massachusetts says removing toppings from a pizza is an unconscious habit for some.
“You have to be careful with food,” said the 34-year-old.
“Eating meals can be quite personal, and if you’ve 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’ll have a salad, saying she’s on a diet, but (then) will remove all the sausage and pepperoni from the pizza almost without realizing it.
The woman added: ‘We’ve been kidding her about it 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 being rude. They didn’t know each other well, and she just went ahead and ripped off the trim. Pretending that she “didn’t really pay attention” is not enough!”
On its website, Giordano’s Pizza, a restaurant chain with operations in nine states, dissected different personality types based on how people eat their pizza.
When it comes to removing toppings and cheese from the top of a pizza, the chain said of this personality type: “You are a picky eater, or you know what you like… Can -maybe you lost the battle for topping selection.”
The website added: “You’re also not 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.
“This is weird but also very rude,” one commenter said of the Redditor’s actions.
“Not only did OP (the original poster) also eat (her boyfriend’s) slice without asking, which is bad in itself, but it’s also a waste because she didn’t even eat the pizza , just the trimmings like a picky, titled , spoiled toddler.
This commenter continued, “It’s like there’s half a cake left over and someone licks off the frosting and leaves the rest now ruined.”
The same commenter added: ‘It’s so, so unnecessary and selfish, it’s infuriating. But also just unbalanced.
Yet another person commented, “I imagine her boyfriend in the living room watching TV as she excused herself to stand in the dark kitchen, the only illumination of the open fridge door as she was leaning over, picking pineapple, pepperoni and cheese from the half-open box and shoving it in his face before he knew it.
The top comment, with 5.9,000 “upvotes” on the platform, simply reads, “This is really unbalanced behavior.”