I apologize for the length of the post ahead of time. I turned 39 years old in August and, until yesterday, had never been in a fight in my life. I’ve always tried to walk away from instances that could turn physical in the past, and while a few of those times have gotten pretty close to turning out that way, they ultimately never did…until yesterday evening. I left my apartment last night to head up the street to the store. As I was driving through the complex, a guy was walking in the middle of the road. He must have heard me behind him, as he didn’t look back, but started to veer towards the curb. I also moved off to the side to give him room. As I got close to him and started to pass him up, I sped back up. He started hollering a bunch of shit at me about how I was a bitch and to slow down. Normally I would have just given a “friendly” honk and kept on going, but I didn’t. I had already been dealing with a shitty day and just wasn’t in the mood to be fucked with. So I put my car in reverse and backed up and asked him if he had a problem he wanted to handle. He took off his shirt and thew his phone and keys and all that in the grass. So I parked my car and got out. We squared up in the middle of the road. Both of us threw a few punches each that were either blocked or didn’t connect. I outweighed the guy by probably a good 80+ pounds or more, so eventually I just rushed at him. He got me once in the face and maybe a few times in the torso (hard to remember it all), but I got him in a headlock and was throwing him around. He wriggled out of it, but I got him again. At that point, he was just windmilling, throwing hits in wherever they were landing. I managed to take him down pretty hard on the ground and had his arms pinned under my legs with his head in-between my hands, ready to start slamming it against the pavement. It would have been really easy for me to do serious harm to him, either by slamming his head on the ground or by elbowing or punching him in the face. But once I got to that point where I had control of the situation and I knew it could have been ended there, I thought about the consequences. Not just legally, but also what it would mean to beat on him when he was defenseless. I told him that I was going to let him up but that if he tried swinging on me again, I wasn’t going to stop that time. He didn’t believe me at first. When I stood up and offered my hand to help him up, he took it and stood up with me. Stopping there and helping him up really changed the entire mood of it all. He really was in disbelief that I would do that. He told me, “Man, if you were the same skin color as me (he was a black man), I know you wouldn’t have stopped when you had me down, so I gotta give you respect for that bro.” I told him I didn’t know about all that, but that I didn’t want to do serious harm to him, or get hurt really bad myself either. We talked about where we worked and a few other things (we were there for maybe 15 minutes or more just bullshitting), before he told me his name was Mike. I gave him my name and we shook hands. He made a joke about how he was going to tell his friends that some “some big white boy had me on the ground but let me go”, and I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that so I just laughed with him. He asked me when the last time I fought was and when I told him I never had, he didn’t believe me at first. I just told him I had always tried to avoid it in the past. Eventually he told me that he lived in the same complex and if I ever wanted to grab a beer or something, to hit him up if I saw him walking around again. I said okay, and drove off. The more time I spent last night thinking of the whole incident, the more I really started to realize just how sorry I was about it. This guy thought that he “lost” the fight, but really he got in some good hits on me (jaw and ribs are pretty sore this morning), and I only ended up on top of him because of my weight advantage. He was also pretty fast, and was younger too (I believe he said he was either 24 or 25), and honestly, though I ended up on top and could have done some serious harm, I still feel like I not only lost the fight just based on “skill” alone (if that makes sense), but also some self-respect for allowing myself to get to that point to begin with. For all you guys out there…is this normal? How do I reconcile the thoughts of both feeling like the loser of the actual fight (which is just vain pride), but also that lack of self-respect for letting myself get to that point in the first place? I guess I’m just kind of mixed up about the whole thing in general and feeling like an asshole about it. submitted by /u/Singing_Steel
Originally posted by u/Singing_Steel on r/AskMen