Woman throws out BF's dinner after he fails to clean for days on end; he's pissed. AITA?
Negotiating the mundane daily patterns of living with a partner can get really tense, really fast. It takes a lot of open and honest communication and compromise in order to create a peaceful living flow.
In a popular post on the AITA subreddit, a woman asked if she was wrong for throwing out dinner after her BF refused to clean up.
She wrote:
AITA for throwing out dinner in response to BF refusing to clean up after himself?
I (24F) and my boyfriend (26F) try to divide our chores as evenly as possible (we live together). He washes the dishes and takes out the trash, while I do laundry, and cook dinner several times a week, along with packing him lunch. We both work similar schedules, he works 10-hour days, 4 days a week, with a 2-hour commute. I work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with a 4-hour commute.
In the past few months, we’ve argued twice about him not cleaning up after himself. The particular sore spots are him not hanging up his bath towel after drying off, which causes it to get moldy and smelly, along with him leaving his clothes all over the ground. He knows this causes me a huge amount of stress and anxiety, and I refuse to do it for him because he is an adult.
In the beginning, I’d ask him every single day, nicely and politely, to put his clothes in the hamper and hang his bath towel up. This would continue for several days straight, and I’d get frustrated and escalate the issue, pointing out that I shouldn’t have to ask him to do this every single day.
In response, he’d get mad, threaten to leave “since he’s such a horrible boyfriend,” say he was going to put it away eventually, and that I was being a b#$%h. Today, I got out of work an hour early, walked home a mile from the train station, and decided to cook us a nice pasta dinner. There was a pile of 5 days worth of his clothes on the floor, making me super anxious and annoyed.
I avoided asking him to put them away the last several days in fear of arguing. Dinner was almost ready when he got home, and I confronted him. I asked him to please put them away now. He said “in an hour” and proceeded to sit at his computer and play on his gameboy. He complained his feet hurt, even though he works an office job and he drove home.
I told him “please do it now, I walked home a mile after working all day and it didn’t stop me from making dinner for us.” He said “if you’re going to hold making dinner over my head, just throw it out” So I did. I threw out a whole dinner of pasta and ground beef, because I felt disgusted by the thought of someone who doesn’t respect me or our living space eating food I exhaustedly spent an hour making.
He freaked out, and said he thinks I have mental problems, because wasting the food was unnecessary and that I’m “erratic.” AITA?
People jumped on to share their takes on the situation.
KnittedBanana wrote:
NTA. You should have left when he started calling you a b@#$h.
LunaticBZ wrote:
Normally I'd judge pretty harshly for throwing away someone's food.
But you get a ton of bonus points for malicious compliance...so NTA.
Valuable-Movie-4400 wrote:
Ugh. Break up with him. You’re not his gf, you’re his mother.
nopenothappening99 wrote:
NTA but it’s not the dinner that needs throwing out here.
SetIcy438 wrote:
NTA. Break up now. It won’t get better. He doesn’t care enough to do basic things like hanging up a towel? Is he 5 years old. Break up. You aren’t “erratic” he is a self-centered jerk who doesn’t care about you.
Clearly, OP isn't TA, and it's likely time to throw in the towel.