Amused Professors Reveal The Worst Paper They've Ever Received From A Student.

Working as a professor or a TA, you're responsible for grading a lot of papers. Thousands along the course of your career, in fact. There are those that stick with you because they are so beautifully worded you could kiss each page, and those that stick with you for a whole other reason. Thanks to these professors for sharing the worst paper they ever graded.
1. I had a student who spelled the country Chile as the food, Chili, and whose only references were a couple of links to google maps.
2. First year english class. The assignment was quite simple a literary analysis of a passage of text. One of my students handed in a stack of pornographic comics, featuring the main characters from the text. When I called him to my office and held up the papers, he gasped and said, "I'm so sorry. I was making those as a joke with my roommates, who also study English, and I must have handed you the wrong papers by accident." He was so red-faced by that point. All I could do was laugh and say, "It was actually pretty good."
Anonymous
3. Hard to choose the WORST, but here are a few that really made me scratch my head...
I once had a student who said the biggest issue facing obese (male) children is that they have small penises. Not ONE of the issues, but the BIGGEST issue. I suppose the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and the potential for issues with confidence and bullying pale in comparison to small genitalia in pre-pubescent males.
In the same class a student wrote that single women were at significant risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection from masturbation. The student was in her twenties.
4. Writing Professor here. I have a couple pretty good ones:
Student 1:
I had a student who was doing pretty poorly in my class. He just wasn't showing up and wasn't doing the work. I asked him to come to my office one day and told him that it wasn't mathematically possible to pass the class anymore. He said okay but that he wanted to stay in the class so he'd be better next time around. I said that was fine, and he showed up for the next couple classes. But then, things got weird.
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For the final paper, I was having them analyze a pop culture text: basically, they had to break down and explain a movie, an album, a TV show, or something like that. This student handed me in an album review cut and pasted directly from Rolling Stone's website. Not a single word was even changed. So I asked him to come to my office again after class. I told him that not only did I find the original article that this was plagiarized from, but it also would have failed even if I hadn't (because it had nothing to do with the assignment). I told him that now his F was an XF (failure for academic dishonesty). He started crying and told me he was "just trying to impress me."
5. One summer, I was teaching a "bridge" course that was for new college freshmen who the university had deemed "at risk" for failing out: usually people who either just barely met the requirements for entry, were first-generation students, or both. Most of the students were awesome. They really wanted to prove something and were hard workers.
One student was trying pretty hard, but she clearly just wasn't getting it. I kept working with her one-on-one outside of class and had my TA tutoring her in the evenings. But we both had the same experience: we'd sit down with her, she'd take notes and even write up parts of a paper, and then she'd turn in something totally different (and way worse). This had been going on all semester, so she was doing really poorly in the class.
She had to get an A on the final paper just to scrape by. So both my TA and I were on her to make sure this final paper was an A. Same problem: we'd work with her, she'd get there, and then she'd turn in something totally different.
She handed in a first draft that was completely unrelated to the assignment I had given. The assignment was to analyze an advertisement for the methods it was using to influence people, but she handed in a paper all about Gwen Stefani. Stefani was in the ad, but the student never got around to actually saying anything about the ad itself. I told her she'd have to completely rework her paper. She said okay, and she worked with both the TA and me one-on-one for the next week to get things in order. She left my office the day before the paper was due with a pretty good draft--not an A, but close enough that I could call it an A. She said she'd tweak it a little and then hand it in.
But what do I get the next day? The first draft with one paragraph from the new draft she wrote in my office, and one paragraph plagiarized from someplace online. The new paragraphs were just dropped in there. I wrote her an email explaining the situation and told her she had failed. Her email back to me, and I quote: "ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME?" Nothing else. I honestly have no idea what she was thinking, but god damn, I tried really hard to help her succeed.
6. I teach a postgraduate course in marketing, and often ask students to give a 10-minute presentation on any subject related to marketing. I like it when students come up with something personal and original, that I like learning about, myself.
One student gave a presentation about Nike and Roger Federer, which potentially is a great subject.
However, the presentation was totally off track.
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It was 50% about Federer's career, and 50% about how he needed special shoes due to previous injuries. He did not bring up anything related to marketing, for example how Federer was a great celebrity endorser for the brand.
In fact he seemed to believe that the co-branded shoes were primarily made for Federer, because he needed special shoes, not for regular Nike customers.
7. I was a TA when I was getting my masters degree in music, and at the end of every semester we would allow the students to either take a final exam or do an in depth analysis of a piece of music and write a paper on the analysis. Some were good, some were not as good, but one student absolutely blew my mind.
When I grade, I always read a paper through first without being really critical just to get a feel for the overall effect of the paper, and I then read through it again to find specific errors in the content, argument, or the writing in general. I read through this particular paper and thought "wow, there is some really great and insightful analysis going on here."
I then read it through again, and I notice something.
After the first paragraph, there is a sentence that contains an open quotation mark that started a parenthetical quote. On the first reading, I thought that the student just forgot the other set of quotation marks, and since the style guide we use required endnotes and not footnotes, I hadn't yet seen the citation. However, what I didn't notice on the first reading was that there was another quotation mark... at the end of the second to last paragraph....
So, if you haven't figured it out yet, this student did not plagiarize the analysis, but instead parenthetically quoted and correctly cited the entirety of someone else's analysis. I honestly just couldn't believe what I was seeing, and had to study it for a good 10 minutes to convince myself that that is in fact what this student had done.
We made him take the exam.
8. For their autobiography, I had one student give me something that was barely a half page of incoherent rabble. Some typos were so bad it looked like they typed by smashing their face into the keyboard. Another student turned in a reflection paper that was supposed to be on a current political issue either nationally or globally. The paper was instead on their favorite sport, which they misspelled. I had another student that decided to not turn in any of the papers he had to do until the day after the semester ended. I looked at only one of those papers, and it was unbelievable.
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It looked like he threw words on the page an hour before he sent them to me. That paper along with the rest of them immediately went into the trash.
9. Worst was easily the essay on Columbia the university instead of Colombia the country.
10. First year physics student fitted an entire 8 question assignment onto a single page of A4. So far, not so bad - if the university I recently moved to allowed students to hand in paper assignments. Nope. Everything must be scanned and uploaded to the online system - the university provides scanners and photocopiers in the library just for this reason.
Student took a photo of the assignment with his mid-2000s flip phone in what I can only imagine was a concrete, windowless cell lit by a single, flickering lightbulb, uploaded the file as a low res JPEG about 250x600px across.
I also got one random assignment I had to send to IT to have the file converted from MS Publisher into something my computer could open (last version of publisher came out in ~2012, I don't have access to the software). Had to email the student to have them resubmit because the equations they'd added got parsed as random-ass rectangles.
Students now get the 'this is camscanner and this is how to make a PDF' talk.
11. was grading a students paper regarding "The Tales of the Heike". I can't remember the line verbatim but the one that took the cake was "readers can agree that Morinaga was kind of a dick."
12. I teach a course on Law, Society and Technology to Software Engineers. Students are assigned an essay where they have to write about how new technology has interacted with law or society to try to take a technology and think about how the specific, technical details have had an impact in a balanced way.
I let students choose topics and as a result I get some really interesting ones. I've graded several papers paper written on Gamergate, which is a term that concerns issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture, stemming from a harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the Twitter hashtag
#GamerGate. One paper stands out among the rest.
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One stands out because it talked about the problems feminism and Social Justice Warriors were causing for the development of new technology and science in general. The student suggested that scientific progress can only be made by men because women can't do maths (source:youtube), that the entire independent gaming industry was controlled by feminists who had used their wiles (not joking that's the term) to infiltrate the controlling roles in the industry (source:youtube) and that feminism has killed more people that communism (source:youtube). In fact, all the sources were youtube.
13. In my AP Literature course, I was grading a paper from a student for whom a C- would be an achievement.
The first paragraph is fantastic. I'm impressed. The second paragraph, awful. The third is again written eloquently, the fourth is atrocious. I call the student to my desk after class, set his paper between us, and tell him I haven't Googled anything yet. But if he'd like to tell me anything about the paper before I did, this was his opportunity.
"Yeah I plagiarized a lot of it."
Alright then.
14. I taught second semester introductory biology classes for majors. Our students had to write lab reports on an in-class experiment we did involving snails.
Two students managed to misspell "snail". One spelled it "snale" and the other spelled it "snell". There are plenty of hard words to spell in biology, but snail is not one of them.
15. Definitely the one where the student copied and pasted several paragraphs from Wikipedia without bothering to change the formatting of the hyperlinks before printing it off.
16. I had a student who spelled the country Chile as the food, Chili, and whose only references were a couple of links to google maps.
(Continued on the next page...)
17. I was a TA for a class one time. A sophomore girl wrote an entire 8 page paper on the use of color in early Islamic architecture except there was one problem - all of her examples were Buddhist temples located in east Asia.
18. I've taught a bunch of different classes that required essays. My favorites include a paper on Taoism, which was completely blank. It would have been cute had a dozen students not tried that before. I get it, but you still have to write the damn paper.
The worst was in a composition class where a student asked for special permission to write her paper on her culture. I agreed, mostly so I would get to read something not on the same boring five topics I was forced to assign. The student turns in the rough draft and the paper is literally a copy/paste from a tourism website, so I turn the student in for a plagiarism violation (after trying to reach out to the student multiple times).
Guess what the student turns in for the final? The exact. Same. Paper. That's two plagiarism violations in one term in case anyone is counting. Needless to say, the student was given a zero in my course and most likely expelled from the university.
19. My favourite paper wasn't necessarily the worst, it was just the most baffling. My students had to write an essay on whether "graffiti had to be vandalism to be an art form. Needless to say, this is a somewhat difficult concept for some students, especially those with an ESL background.
One such young woman didn't quite understand what I was going for and sat with me during office hours. I tried to explain it to her with a few examples. For instance, 'do you think, for instance, the crude drawings of penises on a bathroom stall are examples of art? What about scribbles on a wall?' - if not, then why not? Alternately, do you think a beautiful mural criticizing a Wal-mart on an actual wal-mart would still be artistically impactful if you took it out of it's contexts and instead put it in a gallery?
Anyway, we discussed her perceptions on art and how she felt about these examples. She left feeling much more focussed and I felt good to've helped.
Two weeks later I get a copy of her essay.
It was titled "Are Penises Art?". The essay was a very well researched and in depth analysis of penis art throughout history. There were pictures, and a whole historical analysis about cocks and balls as depicted in art work. Her search history is still no doubt eroding her computer from within. There was nothing related to the original question, but the essay was so odd and so out of nowhere and brought me so much joy that I passed it.
Thanks for reading!
People Break Down Which Practices The United States Needs To Adopt From Other Countries
We can all agree that there is something to appreciate about every country in the world, but there are arguably some countries that appear to have their ducks more consistently and happily in a row than others.
While it would be easy to let pride get in the way and continue to do things the same way, the more productive thing would be to learn from the countries who have figured out a better way to do certain things, whether it's healthcare, food banks, or other services.
Reflecting on the United States, Redditor Blinds**thead asked:
"What is one thing the USA should adopt from some other country?"
Introductions to Alcohol
"Swedish drinking laws. If I remember correctly, you can purchase alcohol below 5% at age 18, and be served liquor in bars (so the bartender can control the amount being served)."
"Seems like a smarter way to introduce kids to alcohol rather than opening the floodgates at 21."
- underhandfranky
Taxes to Approve
"Automated taxes."
"I've never done them but they seem complicated and stress my parents out, so I just know I'll f**k mine up and end up in stupid jail, lol (laughing out loud)."
"Just send me something to sign, please!"
- teenage-nightmare
Societal Improvement
"A prison system that focuses on rehabilitation instead of punishment. Many countries have been successful with this saving literally billions of dollars and cutting down on crime."
- LtRecore
Universal School Lunches
"Universal school lunches. It is embarrassing that we do not have folks cooking lunches for students from scratch and that it is not provided for free to all students."
"Do you want to bring your own lunch? Great, but you can also have the free hot lunch that looks homemade, not pizza squares, canned veggies, a slice of fruit, and 3 oz of milk."
"Kids shouldn't be going into debt for lunch. We're probably wealthy enough that our food waste alone would be sufficient, if captured magically, to feed every kid in the United States three proper meals per day."
"Also walkable cities and above-ground monorail systems."
- radiantpenguin991
Relieving Homelessness
"Finland has recently ended homelessness by just allowing people to live in small apartments without any preconditions, and four out of five of them make their way back to a stable life."
"It's also cheaper than allowing people to be homeless."
- littleMAHER1
Period.
"Universal healthcare."
- fastal_12147
Foster Care Assistance
"It would be nice to also eliminate the fees foster parents pay for general registration, classes, and social services related to fostering or adoption."
"And also eliminate trying to recoup costs by billing parents whose children have been placed in foster care."
- hawtpahtadah
Longer Paid Family Leave
"I was SUPER blessed to get 12 weeks fully pay. But that’s not enough time. Putting the emotional aspect aside, I’ve returned to work functioning on four to five hours of sleep a night, and my productivity and cognitive abilities are greatly handicapped."
"My three-month-old son can’t even hold his head up or sit, let alone talk to tell me if anything’s wrong, and he’s placed in the care of someone else from 7:15 am to 5:15 pm. Doesn’t seem healthy for mother or child."
- tealpineapple456
Bathroom Upgrades
"The fact that our toilets don't have bidets and that at public restrooms the gap between the doors is massive, are both disgusting. Our whole bathroom situation is messed up."
- darksix
Having a Siesta
"According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, whether you eat lunch or not, everyone requires a rest midday."
- Justhere_2468
Tax Included in the Price
"Man, I had such a hard time with this when I visited America. Maths in my head is not my forte and I’m so used to looking at prices and expecting that to just be the price."
"I don’t get why you wouldn’t just add in the tax to the price. No one wants to do math unnecessarily. I mean, we don’t even tip in Australia so I don’t even need to work that out."
- Cookie_Wife
Raising Multilingual Children
"Teaching a foreign language to young students in public schools (ie 5yrs, k-5) when the propensity to learn the language quickly is maximum."
- zenjen22
Clean Public Restrooms
"The clean restrooms in Japan were amazing. I never had to clean a toilet seat to put my young kids on it. In the states? Near every time. People here just don’t care about the ‘we’ when it comes to restrooms."
- NoodlesAreAmazing
Separate Work and Healthcare
"Decent healthcare that isn't tied to your job. Other countries all over the world have figured out different ways to do this, so why can't we? (I know, corporations own politicians.)"
"I'm not an expert, but I'm guessing it would destabilize a bunch of industries in the near term. But I wonder if long-term, it would create so much new innovation since people would be unafraid to lose their health benefits to leave their stable but s**tty corporate jobs to start new ventures."
- michiman
Designated Drivers on the Go
"In Japan, there is a service that you can call 24 hours per day that will come with two drivers and one car. One driver drives you and your car home, and the other follows in their car to pick up the driver that took you home with your car. No DUI, etc."
"It's actually really affordable there. No need to get an uber home that night and then an uber back the next day when you are hungover only to find out you have a million parking tickets or your car got towed."
- Visual_Sport_950
Though there are positives to every country, it would be so cool to see each country be more open-minded about adopting the positives of other countries.
If a country is doing something better than another, the best thing for the citizens would be to take some notes, rather than let their pride do the talking.
Every year, at the end of the Academy Awards, while the auditorium erupts in cheers upon the announcement of the Best Picture winner, as they are somewhat obligated to do, many viewers at home instead shake their heads and raise their eyebrows.
That's if they don't throw popcorn or worse at their TVs.
While those who did so when La La Land was announced as the winner in 2017 would end up getting their revenge in what remains one of the biggest blunders of Oscar history, others are still reeling at some past winners, which they believe were more worthy of a Razzie than an Oscar.
Taste being subjective, plenty of people still find themselves confused by some films which won countless awards, received across-the-board raves, and are considered classics or masterpieces, but they find to be utterly unbearable.
Often finding themselves in an unpopular minority and having to keep their opinion to themselves, similar to Seinfeild's Elaine Benes and her unique disdain for The English Patient.
"Which film that’s universally praised do you find utterly repulsive?"
Any Downers
"My best friend really enjoys movies that make you anxious and uncomfortable like 'Uncut Gems' and 'Good Time', but I firmly do not like those kinds of movies."
"I know it's the point, but i find no joy in the level of discomfort I feel while watching them."
"Some other honorable mentions:"
"Spring Breakers."
"High Life."
"Climax."- nuut_meg
Not Exactly Authentic
"'The Greatest Showman'."
"Mostly on the grounds that the real P T Barnum was a f*cking monster."- LostMercenary99
"'Pocahontas'."
"The real John Smith was a f*cking sick bastard and the true events most definitely weren't a love story at all."- CagedKage
Who The "Devil" Was Is Debatable...
"'The Devil Wears Prada'."
"I just wanted everyone in that movie to die in a fire."- PothierM
Tearjerker, Or Sleeping Pill?
"'The Notebook'."
"I don't know if it's universally praised but I f*cking hate it."- sara_c907
One Of The All Time Creepiest Shower Scenes...
"F*cking 'Elf'."
"Every damn Christmas."
"To be fair I can’t really stand Will Ferrel in general."- cook-isation
The Title Could Refer To The People Leaving The Theater...
"'Fast and Furious', just a terribly written extremely corny show."- tds542
Fern Gully Did It Better...
"'Avatar'."
"All day long."
'Those blue miserable tw*ts."- akbarkhan666
There Was Bound To Be One...
"I don't know about utterly repulsive, but I have a hard time seeing why everyone loves 'Citizen Kane'."
"And I understand that there was movie making before 'Citizen Kane' and movie making after 'Citizen Kane' such that it informed movie makers going forward as to how it's done, let's say, but after a certain point we, the audience, don't see that anymore, and it's just another movie."
"And then I hear people say well it highlights social hierarchy under capitalism and such, but a lot of movies do that."
"And then there's the twist at the end which is not much of a twist which is the point, I suppose, but the whole thing seemed like a letdown when I finally watched it."
'As a result while a lot of people say it's their number one movie ever or at least in their top 10, it's on my top 10 list of movies not to watch again."- emjaysea
Why Not Just Do A Documentary?
"Most Biopics."
"I think it's atrocious how they create hyperreality by over romanticizing the life of a famous person."
"Out of all the awful biopics however, i despise 'Bohemian Rhapsody' the most."
"The scene where the band supposedly invents 'We Will Rock You' on the spot makes my skin crawl."
"How did that movie end up winning so many awards, despite all the plot inaccuracy's and the poor editing."
"It is really beyond me."- Biemolt
Maybe Too Realistic?
'Not utterly repulsive, but I'm in the minority for thinking that 'Nomadland''s Best Picture win was a joke."
"It was barely a movie and relied too much on performance exploitation of actual people for its thin-as-f*ck narrative."
"Honestly, it might be my least favorite BP winner of recent times, yes I'd say that even 'Crash', 'The Artist' and 'Green Book' were better."- SamwisethePoopyButt
Not To Mention That Fake Baby...
"'American Sniper'."
"Shameless piece of 'Merican' propaganda, and I couldn't help but laugh at Bradley Cooper's portrayal in the first half hour."- mos_meth
Truman Capote Would Agree...
"Breakfast at Tiffany's."- LucyVialli
He Did Not Have Them At Hello...
"'Jerry Maguire'."
"It was just TOO. DAMN. LONG."
"The 'Show me the money' bit was funny, but it happened early on in the film, and the rest dragged on forever."- Brilliant_Tourist400
We All Know "Moonlight" Was Better...
"'La La Land'."
"The music was utterly forgettable and the plot felt like it was written by a bunch of Hollywood executives jerking each other off."- Aviator506
Needless to say, everyone's taste is different, and everyone is entitled to their opinion.
Meaning there's bound to be an argument at the next "movie night" you have with friends over whether to watch Citizen Kane or Spice World.
And you should feel no shame in expressing which movie you want to watch.
Or rather, "what you really, REALLY, want" to watch...
Everyone wishes there was something different about their body.
Smaller nose, longer legs, a different hair or eye color.
There are those, however, whose frustrations with their body are less personal, and more universal.
Finding themselves frustrated less with their own DNA, but with human anatomy in general.
Frustrated by how certain functions work the way they do, and feeling there could be significant improvements in other departments as well.
"What is the biggest design flaw of the human body?"
Would Make A Lot Of People Less Cautious
"Unable to regenerate body parts."
"You lose an arm or a leg, you can't grow a new one."
"We can grow hair and nails forever, but not body parts."- drygnfyre
And Maybe The Whole Childbirth Process While We're At It...
"The size of the average baby head vs the size of the average vagina."- Ruggiard
"The Obstetric Dilemma."
"Basically, the human body isn't built for easy birth."- strykazoid
It Isn't Terribly Practical If You Think About It...
"IMO the whole 'we put food into the only air hole we have and can choke and die if we aren’t careful' thing is a pretty big miss."- el_rico_pavo_real
"Throat has a built in flaw - we breath n swallow food through the same area."- coolguy1793B
A More Direct Route Would Be Helpful
"I like the example of the recurrent laryngeal nerve."
"It runs from the brain to the larynx."
"However, to get there it goes from the brain, down the neck, into the chest, around the aorta and then back up the chest, up the neck and then connects to the larynx."
"That's a massive detour."
"It also means a blow to the chest can damage your ability to talk."- The_Thunder_Child
Never Underestimate The Damage Teeth Can Do
"The fact that I sometimes accidentally eat the inside of my mouth."- -Grey_Area-·
He Does Have A Point
"'Nostalgia is the greatest human weakness. Second only to the neck'... -Dwight Schrute
In Plain Sight...
"In our eyes, the blood vessels supplying our photoreceptors are in front of them and therefore in the way of the incoming light."
"Probably not the biggest and there are some good justifications for it being set up this way."
"But it still must be such a pain for the brain constantly having to edit these out when forming our visual experience."- oliwoggle
Maybe Just Every Illness And Ailment?
"A stroke."
"My aunt had one when she was 31 and the healthiest person in the world."
"Ran an aerobics class at the Y, just perfect perfect health."
"Went to Pizza Hut with her the night before, next day, massive stroke, almost died, critical surgery, twenty years later she still has trouble speaking."
"It sucks."
"There is no reason that should’ve happened."
"Perfectly healthy person damaged for the rest of her life."
"She’s still amazing and lovely and my favorite person but damn is that annoying."- Jibber_Fight
"You can kinda just die at any moment from a brain aneurysm, even if you're perfectly healthy."- mcsteve87
All Our Bones Could Be Stronger...
"For upright walking creatures, why is our head so (relatively) delicate?"
"Trip a single time and you're blinded, have brain damage, bit off your tongue, or lost teeth."- kmn493
They Arguably Also Weren't Built For Stairs...
"Our knees for sure."
"They just weren't built to last past 40 years."- TopShelfCrazy
A Couple More On/Off Switches Would Be Helpful As Well...
"That we cannot delete or sort unwanted/not needed info and memories from our brains."- PickAName616
As the saying goes, "nobody's perfect."
Or rather, "no BODY is perfect."
Otherwise, we'd all stop complaining about aching limbs or worrying about choking or other injuries.
Relationships are hard, and sometimes, they're confusing. When you're having a problem with your partner, or you're inexperienced and looking for lessons, you turn to your friends and family for advice.
Sometimes, the advice is sound and helps make things better.
Other times, the advice is trash and makes everything worse.
Redditors know this all too well, and are sharing the worst relationship advice they've ever gotten.
It all started when Redditor Spectrelegit asked:
"What is the worst relationship advice you've ever heard?"
Loyal As A Dog
"Any "loyalty tests". Always a bad idea."
– thedawntreader85
"Heard a youtube therapist once say that as soon as you decide to do a loyalty test, you've already decided the relationship is over because either they fail and you can't trust them, or they pass and you show them that you don't trust them and they stop being able to trust you"
– ParkityParkPark
Choose
"Ultimatums fall under a similar category."
– GarbageTheClown
"If this is a current situation it sounds pretty toxic, and if you are unhappy I hope you get the support you need to make any changes."
– countzeroinc
Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend
"Spend 3 months salary on an engagement ring. This was literally started by the rich diamond families to increase sales."
– Samisoy001
"My girl literally threw a jewelry store book at me with the ring she wanted circled and happily said there was a coupon lol. It was like $80 but it's the one she wanted. We've been together for almost 10 years and happily married for nearly 3 now"
– shumi19
"Yeah it's ridiculous, there's lab created gems that are basically the same and a fraction of the cost."
– YouJabroni44
"I’ve said this to friends and family several times when they’ve asked me while stressing about picking out expensive rings:"
"if the ring is the problem, then the ring is not the problem."
– DamonHay
Not The Way To Go
"There was a Reddit post about a guy who told his partner that she stunk several times a day. Poor girl was horrified. It got to the point that she was showering incessantly, using industrial strength deodorants and he still complained non-stop."
"Paraphrasing here, but when finally confronted, it turns out his father had given him this sound advice: “Tell a women she smells bad, and she’ll never leave you.”"
"Daddy was wrong."
– UnderstandingEmpty21
Anything Doesn't Go
"That you only truly care if you're "ride or die.""
"An ex once told me that she thought if she pushed me far enough that I'd leave. I told her "Yes, I would leave. Why would I want to be with someone who thought so little of me that they'd push me far enough?""
"I had put up with a lot of abusive behaviour from her and it didn't last much longer before she tested my statement and I did exactly what I said."
– FancyMFMoses
"Totally!! And that you should love your partner “unconditionally” ie any behaviour goes. Nope"
– Rare-Republic-1011
Maybe Not The Right Person To Ask
"A friend of mine once prefaced some unsolicited advice about my 10-year marriage with the phrase, "I've been in dozens of relationships..." and then he went on to rant about how men shouldn't do the grocery shopping or something stupid like that."
– Odd-Sink-9098
"Right, we had a three times divorced friend who loved to give relationship advice. Most of it was BS."
– JanuarySoCold
"The Children" Need A Good Example
"Stay together for the kids."
"I was the child. Please don’t."
– ArtisticPolarBear23
"I was also the child. Your children know when you don’t love each other, when you’re fighting all the time because you decided to stay with someone you can barely tolerate. They will live with that knowledge and grow up with a warped perception of love and relationships because they were never given a proper example."
"They will either become obsessive and do whatever they can to make someone stay, or they’ll develop a fear of commitment that will ruin every relationship before they even get the chance to try it. Divorce can be messy, especially when kids are involved, but sometimes the alternative can be far worse. If you decide to have kids, do right by them."
– imscaledandicy
Nobody's Perfect
"“There is a perfect person out there”"
"No. No there isn’t. There is no such thing. People change as they experience life. To believe someone will stay the same forever is silly. Pick someone who you can grow with and shares common values with you. Everyone has to make some compromises and that includes someone making them on you too."
– BallTipSizzler
Not A Great Justification
"Being married is like eating spaghetti every night for dinner. No matter what sauce you put on it, it's still spaghetti. Sometimes a man needs to eat some steak once in a while."
"That was from my dad while trying to justify cheating on my mom."
– Feelin_Dead
Look Good For You
"My (very attractive but very unhappy in her own marriage mother) tried to make me believe that the secret of a successful marriage is to look desirable at every hour of the day and night . Make up, clothes, perfume… anything to keep the husband interested. Having a personality is nice but not necessary."
– ComplexPrinciple3636
"I feel guilty of this, although I also feel like I can take the time to get ready all I want, he’s still going to admire someone else and probably in front of you. Just get ready for yourself if it makes you feel better. I have always hated to go out in public to run into anyone bareface, whether it’s an old friend, someone who picked on me in school, an old crush."
"Not sure where it came from me being this way but growing up my parents made fun of me when I’d have no make up on. If I got bad grades or did something that upset them they’d take it away and give it back saying “I need it.” Then other days tell me I wear too much of it, like high school wasn’t enough already. I could never win."
– 1lilhedgehog
"I know several people who believe this and it’s sad"
– Arra13375
Don't Be Who You Are
"When I was a teenager, my mom told me to not let boys see I was smart because no man is attracted to a woman whose smarter than he is. Also, I should work on my laugh because no one would be attracted to my laugh."
– Educational_Use_9980
"Being smart and passionate about your interests is the most attractive thing ever"
– DogShampoop
Tell Me I'm Right
"Most people that come to you for relationship advice don’t want to advice they want you to validate the terrible decision they are about to make."
– IBdunKI
"I think your statement applies to advice in general. A lot of people to want to actually change or put in effort, they just want validation for their choices."
– BusinessBear53
Yeah, that tracks.
We cannot believe some folks are dishing out such advice!
Has anyone every told you something truly crazy to keep a relationship propped up? Let us know in the comments.