What experience made you grow the fuck up?

Lived a rather sheltered life through high school...fairly normal household, played sports, got in minor trouble but nothing serious, kept grades decent, and held a part time job.

Met the love of my life (who I have been married to for 15 years now), and we wanted to date, but her parents thought she was too young and did not want her dating AT ALL. This was heart breaking because we really wanted to be together...so we decided we were going to move out on our own, finish what we needed to finish and start life together.

For the first month we had almost no money and had to find a "friend" who would let us live for really cheap. Her friend from high school had just bought an old trailer, and had a tiny second bedroom she would rent to us for $200/month. We jumped at the chance...and over that next month, the things that happened made us both grow up faster than lightning. Just a few of the dozens of things were:

  • Woken up in the middle of the night by a guy shooting a gun into the trailer stating his wife was hiding in there with all of his money (he was high on PCP and none of us had any idea who he was). One bullet went through the ceiling in our room...yeesh.
  • Roommate turned out to be dabbling in various drugs...one night around midnight, a guy comes in with her, proceeds to start smoking crack in the kitchen, and then pulls his dick out and starts jacking off into the roommates mouth while we were trying to watch TV.
  • Me and my wife (GF at the time) were coming home one night from seeing a movie. We walked in and there is an orgy going on with drugs EVERY where (cocaine, weed, crack, pills of all sorts)...there two guys and a girl having sex on our bed and when we asked them to leave one of the guys pulled a knife on me and held it to my neck...we got in the car and left.

...it took us about a month to save up for the security deposit plus first months rent to get our own place, so we had to live amongst all of these things, but after that last night and the knife incident, we rushed out and begged a local apartment complex to let us make payments on the security deposit and they did and we moved in about 3 days later.

We saw her several months later at the store and she looked like she was beaten pretty badly. She asked if we had an extra room but we didn't because we had a studio apartment...she said she had no money so we gave her $50 and kind of considered that a mutual "thanks" for giving us a launching platform for our life. We never saw her again after that...but boy, did it light a fire under our asses to get out and do something to improve our living arrangement and life in general.

/r/AskReddit Thread