6 Stories That Prove Secondhand Embarrassment Is a Full-Body Experience: ‘I Wanted to Die on the Spot’

Secondhand embarrassment is honestly a full-body experience. Like you’re just standing there, minding your business, and someone else says one sentence that’s so unnecessary, so loud, so confidently wrong…and suddenly you’re overheating. Your soul leaves your body. You start looking around like, is there an emergency exit or do I simply evaporate right here?

And the worst part? The person who caused it is usually thriving. Zero shame. Living their best life. Meanwhile you’re the one taking psychic damage like you personally committed the crime.

That’s the exact vibe of this week’s episode, and it’s so painful in the best way.

On What We Said, best friends and cohosts Jaci Marie Smith and Chelsey Jade Curtis sit down to read listener-submitted secondhand embarrassment stories and react in real time. The common thread? Partners, boyfriends, and husbands who speak before a single thought has passed through their brain. If you’ve ever wanted to dissolve into the floor because of something your significant other said in public, you’re about to feel incredibly seen.

‘We hope to replace you one day’

A couple was chatting with an elderly neighbor about how long she had lived in her home. It was normal, friendly small talk—until they started walking away and the husband said, “We hope to replace you one day.”

He meant, “We hope to be here that long.” But what he said sounded like a polite threat. “Can’t wait to snatch your house when it’s in foreclosure,” Curtis jokes. “Can’t wait to go to your estate sale.” The wife says every time they walk by the house now, she teases her husband about it. As she should.

The empty brewery sit-down

One listener described sitting at a brewery with her hubby surrounded by more than 20 empty tables on a random afternoon. They’re in full comfy clothes, baseball caps, giving “we were absolutely not supposed to be seen in public today” energy. A dressed-up couple walked in, very much giving first date vibes, and the guy looked at his date and went, “Where should we sit?” 

Without missing a beat, the husband went, “Oh, you can sit with us.” The couple stopped, looked directly at them, gave absolutely nothing back—”no smile, no laugh, no response, not even a polite pity chuckle”—and just walked away and sat down within full eyesight. “I wanted to die on the spot,” the listener explained. “Meanwhile, my husband is completely unbothered. Like, sir, that was embarrassing.”

The Christmas Eve battery incident

Two families were meeting for the first time on Christmas Eve, and by all accounts, the night was going perfectly. The host, Pam, had cooked an incredible dinner, the wine was flowing, conversation felt easy, and everyone was settling into that rare first-meeting comfort where you start to think, okay, this is going well.

At one point, they decided to play Catchphrase, but the batteries were dead—an entirely normal, fixable problem. That’s when Pam’s boyfriend, Peter, looked around the table full of people he had just met and casually said, “I know Pam has plenty of batteries in her toys upstairs. We could use some of those.”

Dead silence.

“Why would he do that to her?” Curtis asks. “That’s evil. That’s not good.” Pam apparently played it off, but the listener said the embarrassment was written all over her face—the kind of moment that lingers long after the dishes are cleared.

The three-finger combo

A couple stopped at Raising Cane’s on the way to visit the wife’s family. For the uninitiated, Cane’s signature meal is called the three-finger combo. It’s chicken fingers. That’s all it is. But when they arrived and her husband saw her dad outside—a man the listener specifically notes she’s “not super close to”—he decided to open the conversation with: “We stopped and got some Canes. It’s not the only three-finger combo Sarah likes about me.” 

Her father stared back with a face that was “equal parts confused and uncomfortable,” and the topic was immediately changed. “What overcame him to say that?” Curtis says. “That’s crazy.” Smith admits it is technically a funny joke—just not to your girlfriend’s dad. Not as your opener. Not in this lifetime.

‘My friend’s dad just died’

A listener’s husband was brand new at his job, maybe two to three months in, when the company Christmas party rolled around. They were chatting with someone new when it came up that this person was actually leaving the company soon to go through cancer treatment. There are a million ways to respond to that. “I’m so sorry to hear that.” “Wishing you the best.” Literally anything with a shred of warmth. This man chose: “Oh yeah, my friend’s dad had brain cancer. He just died.” 

The colleague’s face was “a mix of shock and horror, no doubt not wanting to picture himself dying in the near future.” When the listener asked her husband later why on earth he said that, he explained, “I was just trying to relate with him.” 

“No dude,” Curtis laughs. “Zip it, that is crazy.” Sometimes the most relatable thing you can do is simply say nothing.

The Zoom rant heard by 100 people

A listener’s college roommate was on Zoom with her class in the living room. The listener casually asked about it from the kitchen, and the roommate absolutely went off. Five full minutes of how “stupid” the class was, how everything the professor said was “absolutely useless,” how she couldn’t “stand the guy.” In other words, she really let it all out. What she didn’t realize was that she was unmuted the entire time. 

The professor was actively asking her to mute herself, but she’d turned her volume down so she couldn’t hear him asking. Almost 100 students were on the call—including, naturally, the guy she had a crush on. She got kicked out of the class and had to have a formal in-person meeting with the professor and multiple advisers to apologize. 

“That just made my stomach churn,” Curtis says. There’s not enough sage in the world to cleanse that energy.

‘What’s everyone looking at?’

A listener’s boyfriend told her earlier in the day that she “wasn’t outgoing enough.” So when they were walking along a pier and she saw him chatting with a fisherman, she thought, OK, I’ll prove him wrong. She spotted a group of people gathered along the railing looking over the edge into the water and walked over with a big friendly smile: “What’s everyone looking at?” One of the women turned around and told her they were scattering her mother’s ashes. It was a funeral…she walked up to a funeral and asked what everyone was looking at. 

“[She] tries to be outgoing once,” Smith points out. The listener said she was so embarrassed she hasn’t been outgoing since, and honestly, that tracks. Some lessons you only need to learn one time.

Listen to the full episode on What We Said, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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