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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/be-sweethearts on 2026-05-18 20:44:22+00:00.

hi so I’m 21F and I don’t know how to swim. It’s not that I never learned, I had an instructor when I was a kid and I swam often. I just had intense body dysmorphia when I hit puberty. This caused me to be repulsed by the idea of me in a swim suit, and I didn’t swim the entirety of middle school to high school so I forgot how to swim. Apparently it’s not like riding a bike, I completely forgot how to swim. I only found the confidence to go out again in bathing suits recently and i just graduated college a week ago lol.

Anyway, I’ve been with Guy 25m for only a month. He really likes me and introduced me to his friends early on. I’ve hung out with him and his friends a few times now. This time we went to Guys parent’s house to swim. I told everyone there I didn’t know how to swim and I’d just sit in the floatie. One guy there said “let me teach you how to swim” and I said okay and he showed me some basic swimming techniques. He told me to do a bit of kicks and laps in the pool with the floatie.

After a while, I stopped using the floatie and was just chilling in the 3ft area. My bf says “throw the floatie down a bit, I wanna see if I can throw this football in it. I throw it to where the pool starts to slant down into 8ft. He misses. So I grab the floatie (it’s donut shaped) and I start swimming to where the football bounced bc I was confident in my rediscovered swimming skills. Well! The floatie is really floaty. It flips me over and I start splashing. I grab the floatie again but it flips me again. I try again and Im holding on to it but it’s tilting and I’m losing grip. I let go and I start splashing again. I’m bobbing up and down, struggling, and I can hear his friend saying “yo I think she’s drowning go help her”. I manage to swim to the edge and grip the wall dig my toes into the wall. my bf comes running and he pushes the floatie closer to me and I hold on to it better so he can drag me over to the 3ft area.

I’m intensely embarrassed. But I know they didn’t care too much. This happened yesterday but every time I touch water I think of it. Like I was cleaning my tub earlier and the splashing of the water just reminded me of the ordeal. I’m so embarrassed. I really overestimated myself lol but I’ll get better at swimming before I do that again.

TLDR

I overestimated my swimming skills and tried to retrieve a football for my bf and my floatie betrayed me