Crushes are all fine and cute until somebody gets hurt. And in this case, that person is a 37-year-old dad on Reddit, who freaked out when his 19-year-old daughter's BFF sent him some unsolicited nudes. To say he was alarmed wouldn't even be the half of it, but now he's wondering if he was wrong for telling his teen daughter that her friend sent him the explicit texts.
The dad explained that his daughter and her friend met in college and have been friends for almost a year.
In a post on r/Am I the A–hole, he wrote that his daughter's friend "Brooke" comes over to their house all the time, but he admitted "she's always made me uncomfortable."
Brooke had never taken things too far, although the dad could tell she clearly liked him.
"I just tried to ignore it and keep my distance," he wrote. "She seemed like a good kid; never in a million years did I think she'd take it any further than laughing a little harder than necessary at my jokes."
That is, until recently when he recently received some text messages from a strange number.
He got three messages to be exact.
"There was one sexually explicit text and two faceless nudes," he recalled.
At first he was confused. Were they texts from an old flame? Unfortunately, a fourth text message made things all too clear.
"I got a video that included Brooke's face," he wrote. "My heart dropped and I felt sick as soon as I realized what was happening."
Without stopping to think, the dad raced into his daughter's room and showed her the messages.
"I was freaked out," he reasoned, "and I impulsively ran into my daughter's room and told her. She was freaked out too, and she asked to see the pictures because she couldn't believe it (I know I shouldn't have shown her but I did, it was another impulsive decision)."
Neither of them could figure out how Brooke got his number.
They suspect she got it off his daughter's phone while she wasn't looking, but in the meantime his daughter told him to back off and left her handle this situation.
"I texted Brooke 'please never contact me again,' blocked her number, and left it at that," he wrote.
The next day, his daughter confronted Brooke and the two former besties got into a huge fight.
"She said that instead of apologizing or explaining herself, Brooke had gotten extremely mad at me for telling my daughter what happened," he explained. "My daughter decided it was best to block Brooke and move on like I had."
But Brooke wasn't ready to let this whole thing go.
A few hours later, Brooke sent the dad a direct message on Instagram that said "please don't block me, I just want to talk to you."
The dad blocked her anyway.
Four hours later, Brooke tried a different tactic.
She sent him a long email at his work address.
"The email is basically a five paragraph guilt trip," he wrote. "It goes into detail about how embarrassed she is that I showed my daughter 'what was meant for just me.'"
Brooke then chastised the dad for giving out her personal information and told him that "if I wasn't interested, I should've just told her and kept her secret instead of going to my daughter."
"Never once did she apologize or acknowledge how wrong it was for her to send me those messages. She just tried to make me feel bad," he explained.
The dad should be angry, but mostly he feels confused.
He's "disgusted" and "angry" that Brooke sent him those photos, but at the same time "she's just a confused insecure kid with problems and I should have kindly let her know how inappropriate that was and told her not to do it again instead of embarrassing her like I did."
He turned to the community to ask if he was being an a–hole about the situation. "I kind of feel like one but maybe I'm just too empathetic," he wrote.
Most people agreed that the dad did the exact right thing given the uncomfortable situation.
"Not the A–hole," one person wrote. "She sent unsolicited nudes. It's perfectly normal that you freaked out and kudos for telling your daughter. She should've known that you are not interested when you didn't engage in her flirting."
"Gender flip that, a young guy sending nudes and the uproar would be deafening," someone else pointed out. "He handled it perfectly In My Opinion."
A third person thought it was more than just an embarrassing situation.
"It's actually pretty bad to minimize sexual harassment towards men and pretend it’s not as bad because historically it didn't happen as much," the person wrote. "It happens now and that's what matters. She sexually harassed him by contacting him AT HIS WORK after he blocked her TWICE. That’s not a 'confused kid' it's obsessive and really creepy."
Later in the thread, the dad shared that this was actually a common problem he had with his daughter's friends.
"Believe it or not this isn't her first friend that's been into me." he wrote. "This is just by far the craziest experience."
Ultimately, the dad is the adult in the situation, and whether his daughter's friend is a "lovesick teenager" or not, it's up to him to draw boundaries and let her know that he's not willing to engage in any inappropriate behavior.
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