Seriously fight or flight isn’t a complete plan. How will you run? How will you disable or delay your attacker? How will you regroup with your wife if she runs and you stay? Answering those questions will be the start of a plan.

I don’t know many men who have enough confidence in their own manhood to rationally consider such an option, but I’m glad I’m married to one of them. :)

Gets their heads-down, and earns much respec for style.

(Bystanders don’t like it so much, but eh.)

I gotta say overall I see it as most defensive scenarios with Asthmatic me, and my wife who is also not an athlete will be essentially “Hey let’s get out of here it looks hairy” because once I’m in a spot to call 911, I suspect my attackers will be MUCH faster runners than the pair of us, which essentially means I just turned my back on a known threat.

We should talk about her getting behind me and having her keep an eye on my back lest thugsley’s buddy attempts to flank us.

In a situation where there’s a specific threat but things haven’t gotten violent, we use a few phrases to communicate intent. “Go on, I’ll catch up,” or even just “Go!” tells her that she should take the children and leave while I delay or otherwise deal with the threat. “Hold up,” means that she should stay close or stay where she is. We also have a couple of code words that we use that mean basically, “Condition Red” and “Condition Black”.

What I finally decided was that bluffing/toughing it out was the best option, but if I wanted her to run it might be good to have a code word. My solution was that if we’re, say, mugged, then if I say “okay, okay” she should stay where she is and if I say “fine, fine” she should run. Not a perfect solution, but that’s my two cents.