Woman Tells Brother She Won't Sit Next to Him on a Flight — Now They're in a Fight

The woman says she simply wanted to sit alone on the international red-eye flight

A woman says her adult brother is now mad at her after she asked that he not sit next to her on an international flight.

In a post shared on Reddit, the 29-year-old woman writes that while planning a recent trip to Germany, she made clear to her 35-year-old brother that she "wanted to sit alone next to the window."

"I haven’t traveled with family since I was a teenager, and I like to travel (flights) alone," she writes. Her brother, however, "was furious."

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"He saw it as a family trip and told me the family must sit together. I didn’t mind spending some quality time together, however sitting in a limited space does not qualify as a quality time for me, especially a red-eye," she adds.

She continues: "Fast forward to the arrival at the check-in counter, I asked for a separate window seat."

But her brother "interrupted and told the airport employee that we’d sit together and that he’d take the middle seat. I caved in."

Once on board the plane, her brother chastised her for using the armrest.

"On the plane, I put the tip of my elbow on the armrest, and he moved my arm, chuckled, and said: 'According to the flight etiquette, the middle seat gets both armrests, haha.' Now he’s NOT an etiquette guy. I felt slightly annoyed, but whatever. The flight itself wasn’t bad, but my flying experience with strangers next to me so far was better."

When it came time to leave Germany, the woman again told her brother that she'd "like to sit alone." After her brother continued to push to sit next to her, she stood her ground, asking for a separate seat at check-in.

"My brother and my dad were seated together and got middle and aisle seats," she adds. "Before boarding, he called me a traitor multiple times, I didn’t respond."

Sitting on her own, she adds, the flight back home was "lovely."

"The middle seat wasn’t occupied, so I was lucky," she writes, adding that her brother made sure she knew his flight was "awful" due to an "irritating" man sitting next to him.

"Later in the evening, he texted me that I didn't appreciate his sacrifice to sit in the middle, and I value my comfort over personal relationships and the needs of other people," she writes, adding that he "also texted that I rubbed in his face my nice experience while he had the worst flight of his life."

Turning to Reddit commenters, the woman wonders: "Does a family that travels together must sit together? Maybe I don't see something objectively in this situation."

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Commenters don't think so.

Wrote one commenter: "You’re an adult and your brother doesn’t get to pick your seat for you."

Still, at least one commenter did agree with the poster's brother about something: use of the middle seat's armrests. "Just as a PSA, the middle seat does get both the middle armrests. If both the window person and the aisle person choose to use both of 'their' armrests, then they’ve removed all the armrests from the middle seat and now a middle seat sucks even more. The window seat gets one armrest and a window; the aisle seat gets one armrest and the ability to use the bathroom without asking others to move. The middle seat gets two armrests. That’s how planes work."