Is there any particular depth of cluelessness to which Reddit’s “Legal Advice” subreddit has not descended? Take today’s example: the redditor who’s told by a neighbor that she’s married, and then wonders if he should have her committed to a mental institution when he sees no evidence of a husband.
(Standard caveats to all Reddit posts apply: This could be a really elaborate prank intended to make redditors look like clueless obsessives. No, really.)
For many women, pretending to have a boyfriend or a husband is an easy out of a conversation with a man who just can’t take a hint and hit the road. With those dudes, the tried and true (and definitely problematic) “Oh, I actually have a boyfriend” line usually does the trick, and can be a face-saving way for everyone involved to back out of an unwanted interaction. Unfortunately, the memo about “I have a boyfriend” doesn’t seem to have reached certain parts of Florida.
Filed under /r/legaladvice, the poster (whose handle Throwaway72626282 doesn’t seem at all suspicious) asks their fellow redditors if they could call Adult Protective Services or have her “baker acted,” or involuntarily committed to a mental institution for being a threat to herself. According to Throwaway72626282, the woman said she has a husband, but the redditor has never seen him and couldn’t find any references to him online either. The redditor even checked her tax returns. (But, remember, the woman is the one whose sanity is in question here. Not the redditor.)
The original post has since been pulled, but you can still see some of the comments archived on Reddit. Throwaway72626282 later claimed to be a “retired teacher and grandmother of 3” and “not a creep.” (I don’t know about you, but my grandmother loves to hang out on internet chat threads and seek legal advice from strangers.)
All this seems very legitimate and not at all like a man who might have been slightly put off when his neighbor told him she was “married.”
