Dedicating your life to a partner usually means you know them pretty well, but there’s still a margin of error.
One man fell into this margin after he found a shopping list his partner wrote, in which she’d listed the items horizontally. The discovery sent Jordan Mongeon, 27, into disarray, leading him to write a tongue-in-cheek Reddit post about the debacle and his “genuine disbelief.” Mongeon spoke with Newsweek about the shock of finding out his partner’s brain worked in a completely different way.
Mongeon’s post begins with him explaining that he loves his partner. “She is the mother of our child, we live together, and share all of our achievements and burdens,” he wrote. “We also communicate when our interests change and I fall in love with each evolution of her. Now I’m questioning everything.”
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He wrote that while the couple didn’t usually make a shopping list, they made an exception one day, and he asked his partner to write down what they needed.
“Upon completion, I took a gander and what was written on that paper turned my world upside down,” he wrote. “Who in God’s infinite creation writes a shopping list horizontally? She said it was to ‘save room on the paper.’ This level of ‘efficiency’ is unsettling and I’ve got a huge problem with this.”
Viewers on Reddit backed Mongeon up for his biting analysis. He told Newsweek he’d taken to Reddit, a platform he was new to, to crowdsource answers about whether this was normal.
“I was sure many people would be just as flabbergasted as I was,” he said. “I wasn’t surprised that it blew up, but I thought it’d be more of a grenade, and this went full-fledged nuclear. Ironically, there were many people who agreed with her as well.”
According to Mongeon, his partner stood her ground during their inevitable confrontation.
He said: “My initial reaction was genuine disbelief. I went through all five stages of grief in about five seconds. I did genuinely ask the rhetorical question: ‘Did you write the grocery list horizontally? Separated by commas?'” he said. “She replied, ‘Yeah, so?’ completely shattering every construct of human civility I’ve clung to with two words.
“She argued that the list was fine because she used commas.”
‘A Roast Is Part of Daily Life’
Mongeon said of his partner: “Our relationship consists of lots of laughter both at our own and each other’s expense. We are not afraid to call each other out on anything. We both have thick skin and grew up in places where a roast is part of daily life.”
Despite what seems like an emphasis on tough love, Mongeon listed things he adored about his partner—who, he said, is different from him in more ways than this one.
“She is not held back by traditional societal standards. She truly walks to the beat of her own techno-drum machine. I tend to be more rigid and scholastic about my approach to life. I find her lack of adherence to perfection to be radical, refreshing and very sexy,” he said.
But these differences, it turns out, are the couple’s secret sauce.
“She inspires me to not be so harsh and critical of myself, and I constantly tell her that she is creative beyond measure,” Mongeon said. “We’re truly Americans at heart. Our appreciation of our differences is what makes us work.”