Blindsided by butter
When friends ignore your dietary restrictions, plus swapping airplane seats.
My good friend recently fixed me a dinner cooked in a butter sauce. She said, “I know you can take a pill for your lactose intolerance, and I assume you brought them with you.” This was in fact the case, and the food was delicious, but I had lingering hurt feelings and some amount of digestive difficulty the next day. What should I say, if anything? J.T. / Arlington Of course you should say something, especially if you don’t want to suffer through another evening of rich creamery torment. It might be best, though, to focus more on facts than on (hurt) feelings. I don’t think your friend was being thoughtless, but rather that she doesn’t understand the parameters of your disorder. From the way you describe her behavior, it sounds as though she thought she’d done all she needed to do by alerting you to take your pills. When you have a lot of friends with different dietary restrictions, it can be hard to keep track, not only of the restrictions themselves but also of just how restrictive they are. Allergies and ethical commitments and digestive complications all wax and wane over time.
Tell your friend her butter dish was delish and you’d love to have it again, but unfortunately the pills don’t work quite as well as you would like. Explain clearly what you can and can’t eat, and the next time she invites you over, ask what she plans to serve. (This isn’t always good form, but if someone knows you well enough to say, “I assume you’ve got your meds handy,” you know her well enough to ask what’s for dinner.) If it’s not going to work for you, say something. You may need to remind her a couple of times before she reliably gets it straight, so be patient.
My boyfriend and I book aisle seats across from each other whenever we fly. We are willing to change seats -- to reunite a family with young children, for example -- as long as the new seat is also an aisle seat. Unfortunately, some passengers asking to swap seats don’t want to accept no for an answer. On a recent flight, a woman asked my boyfriend to move to her cramped middle seat because she “had” to sit next to her husband because they were newlyweds. When we politely declined, she whined, sighed, glared, and moaned throughout our two-hour flight. How should we have handled this? M.S. / Foxborough Your basic approach to seat swapping is correct, of course. And in this specific instance, you gave both yourselves and the other couple a good, relationship-strengthening story to tell. Think about it. If you’d given up your seat, they would have gotten nothing more than an hour or so of uncomfortable canoodling under reused airline blankets. As it is, they got the excitement-producing frustration of being physically separated -- how passionate their reunion at the baggage carousel must have been! Plus, Mr. and Mrs. Entitleman now have a great story to tell about the totally unreasonable couple that wouldn’t switch seats with them even though they were newlyweds. This story will no doubt engender sympathy among their similarly obnoxious friends and will signal rational folk to stay the heck away from these drama-prone moochers in the first place, so it’s all good.
If you’d given up your seat, on the other hand, you would have been resentful about it, and reasonably so. But the Entitlemans probably would have behaved well enough after that that you wouldn’t have gotten any stories out of it. Instead, you kept your desired seats, got a good story, and even got published in the paper. Whether the Entitlemans ever realize it or not, your handling of the situation was a win/win.
Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a Cambridge-based writer with a PhD in psychology.Got a question or comment? Write to missconduct@globe.com. BLOG Read more of Miss Conduct’s wit and wisdom at boston.com/missconduct. CHAT Get advice live this Wednesday, noon to 1 p.m., at boston.com. 
