Wife hurt by husband saying her home cooking method is 'infantilizing.'
When this woman is upset with her husband, she asks Reddit:
'WIBTA if I stopped buying TV dinners for my fiancé?'
A bit of background: My fiancé (35m) and I (26f) have been dating for 6 years and living together for 4. We both work healthcare and have hectic schedules. I've been minimally employed for about 2 months and started cooking in my spare time.
I've been offering to make my fiancé food to make breakfasts and dinner easier on him. He always tells me 'yes' if I ask if he wants me to make extras for leftovers, but as soon as they get put in the fridge, he won't eat them and instead comes home and grabs a TV dinner to put in the microwave.
This means I'm often stuck eating the same meal for a week at a time otherwise it sits in the fridge and goes bad. This gives me severe anxiety because I grew up food-insecure and watching food go bad fills me with dread.
When I brought it up, he basically told me he would forget the leftovers were in there and kept grabbing TV dinners.
I got a whiteboard to put on the fridge and started writing what leftovers were in there and he got insulted and said the idea was 'infantilizing' so I didn't use it. He kept grabbing TV dinners, and it was hurtful/insulting that he would overlook the leftovers for them.
Lately, I've been struggling with some mental health issues (anxiety) and cried about how hard it is to keep on top of the kitchen and that I felt like I was getting 'stuck' in there being the only one who cleans it while my boyfriend gets the (imo MUCH easier) chore of washing clothes.
He offered to switch chores for a while so I could take a break, and I agreed. That was about 6-8 weeks ago, and in that time he's washed about half the dishes ONCE. I've been washing dishes as I've needed them and putting a few through our mini-dishwasher when able.
Yesterday I broke down again because I just wanted to cook so I'd have something to eat, but there were dishes on every surface of the kitchen (covering counters, stove, table, chairs, and sinks) and it took 2 hours of washing to catch back up (not including wiping counters and floors, etc) and by the time I was done, I didn't have the energy to dive into cooking.
When I talked to him about it, he told me he was 'too busy' with work to clean the kitchen and that he would've gotten it later in the week (at least 3+ days) and that I was overreacting to not having a space to cook, and it can wait or I can do it myself.
It feels like the kitchen got dumped on me AND now I'm doing the laundry, and I genuinely believe it's because he's perfectly content grabbing a TV dinner (doesn't need anything to cook, just a fork to eat with) and getting out of the kitchen.
It's a small thing to him, but his habit of grabbing a TV dinner is making me feel unappreciated and that it's enabling him to ignore the chore he offered to take.
WIBTA if I stopped buying TV dinners for a while so he'd address these issues?
Let's find out.
keycustomer says:
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a definition of insanity.
Don't cook for him, and don't buy frozen dinners. Let him deal with it!
myalligatormouth writes:
Stop it. Right now you're in martyr mode, you're going out of your way, doing things over and over again that he doesn't appreciate, you're making yourself a victim at this point.
Stop cooking for him, stop wasting his clothes, just stop, if you continue you only have yourself to blame. YTA to yourself at this point.