My MIL talks about being a teacher a lot. She's dealt with all sorts of injuries - broken bones, seizures, heads split open, etc... when my now husband broke his arm she was a full on mess and another teacher had to help him.

I have been calm in a fire, with a gun in my face, on a small plane in sudden turbulence, in the middle of a car accident... when my daughter was a couple months old, she stopped breathing and I panicked. My wife revived her and I drove them to the hospital. You can't know how you are going to react to every situation. If that's all it takes for him to lose respect for her, he has a very low tolerance and she will likely be better off without him.

I agree. And how you react when being woken up in the middle of the night to a fire, where other people are rushing around trying to put it out instead of fleeing, might be a totally different situation than when your child is in danger. You might be terrified of a spider, but have no problem protecting your child against a wild dog or pulling your husband out of a crashed car.

True, but you can control who you're going to have at your side all your life to face stressful situations.

This isn't about her being ineffective. It's not about her trying to help, to follow the other two people and being bad at it, or even if she couldn't visually process well and so couldn't see a fire extinguisher in front of her face. She was actively screaming and hindering her family from escaping. An initial scream just happens, but this was sustained. She put the others at risk because she wouldn't try and help or even just leave them, she had to be pulled out by SIL. I'm sure he's thinking about future kids, could you really leave them with someone who couldn't even try to survive when she and her partner were in danger? You couldn't go anywhere with her that she was the only help - on a boat, on a hike, most places you'd go swimming. It's more dangerous to go with someone like that than to go solo. Very hard to want a life partner like that.

you definitely can.

You can't control what you want, either. If you dont want to be with someone that's useless in an emergency, you can't control that.

By the time you're an adult, how you react in stressful situations is how you've trained yourself to react. Every time you are in a stressful situation, in a panic, you are reinforcing the reaction. Do you scream? Do you take a breath? Do you rush to action? Do you freeze? That's why teens and young kids aren't as good in a cruaidh, they dont usually have the prqctice. You can't learn calm overnight, but she's clearly been amping up the panic/damsel in distress since childhood.

Good response. How someone handles an emergency isn't always under their control as others above commented. It may be that this is a deal-breaker for him and that's ok too. What I can't tell is if he's a genuine a$shole, or if he's just ignorant about people and emergencies. There was a similar reddit a couple of years ago about a group of friends on a boat that had a small engine fire. The gf/fiance also went into full panic mode, except she was actively grabbing onto people and screaming bloody murder, while the guys (all experienced boaters) ran around dealing with it, and genuinely made the situation dangerous for all involved. He asked the same questions as here, but eventually understood that people don't always have control over themselves in those situations. In his case, he accepted she wasn't wrong for it, nor was he wrong to feel this was an important compatibility point for him. He ended up breaking up with her after some long talks... can't remember how she took it.

The woman should run : op seems to be a nuclear as.shole.

She didn't "make him feel" anything. He chose to be an a*****e who only cares about himself. There's no therapy that can cure that.