Pregnant Woman Wants To Know If She’s In The Wrong For Wanting To Sleep In Separate Rooms
Her husband is giving her a huge guilt trip.
Pregnancy is often a tough time, both for individual pregnant people and for couples. Bodies are changing, lives are changing, and emotions — for hormonal and non-hormonal reasons — run high. So, it’s perfectly understandable that interpersonal spats can pop up from time to time even among the strongest couples.
Reddit user u/Illustrious_Hour2042 (we’ll call her Illustrious) took to everyone’s favorite subreddit “Am I The Assh*le” to ask a question about her own pregnancy-related marital issue.
“My husband is making me feel like the villain here and I’m honestly not sure if I’m in the wrong or not,” she wonders.
Illustrious is 27 weeks pregnant, suffering from that all-too-common pregnancy symptom: sensitivity to smells. Unfortunately, it’s only gotten worse as she’s progressed in her pregnancy and some smells can make her immediately sick, including food, smoke, and cologne.
“This is an issue because my husband works in a restaurant and smokes so it’s difficult being within a few feet of him at most times unless he’s freshly showered,” she explains. “He works late hours and usually just wants to sleep when he gets home, which I get. However, he comes to bed smelling like restaurant food and smoke which will wake me up from a dead sleep because my smell is triggered.”
She’s asked him to shower, she continues, but he says he’s too tired and has come up with a “solution” of spraying himself with body spray instead.
“Which is honestly worse,” she laments and... yeah, we know.
“The past week it’s been so bad that I usually just get up when he comes to bed around 2 to 3 a.m. and either go sleep on the couch or get up for the day,” she says. “However, when he wakes up and sees I’m not in bed or sleeping on the couch he gets mad that I left.”
So, to recap: a smell-sensitive pregnant woman asks her smoky, stinky husband to rinse off before bed so she doesn’t get ill, which he refuses, opting instead to douse himself in a third smell that makes her nauseous, and then gets mad when she gives up the bed for him.
But it doesn’t end there.
“It came to a bit of a head last night when he came to bed reeking of body spray and smoke and tried to cuddle with me.”
Oh girl, not the smoky-greasy-body spray cuddle! We did not break up with our high school boyfriends to go backward like this...
She continued, “I immediately started gagging because the smell was overpowering and tried to leave the room. I told him it’s temporary, but if he’s not willing to shower before bed we need to sleep in separate rooms because I cannot handle the smell right now.”
His response: get mad, gather his things, and lock himself in the guest bedroom. And while this does solve the immediate problem, the attitude that prompted it and followed is helping no one.
“He’s been ignoring me all day and making things awkward walking around the house and talking to our toddler but avoiding eye contact, conversation, and keeping a wide berth from me,” she says. “The only conversation we’ve had is ‘This is what you wanted right?’
“I feel like it’s not a super unreasonable request to shower before coming to bed and I was willing to sleep in another room as well,” she concludes. “AITA here? Should I just suck it up for a few weeks until everything balances back out? Pregnancy is weird guys.”
Pregnancy is weird, but you know what’s weirder? This husband.
And commenters agree, resoundingly that Illustrious is absolutely “NTA” or “not the assh*le.”
For one, we know it’s late at night, but a 5-minute rinse is absolutely required after a restaurant shift — it’s a hard, often dirty job —especially if you’ve been smoking.
For another, if you haven’t learned that cologne/perfume/body spray isn’t a shower substitute by the time you’re, like, 19, I don’t know how to make you understand that. And number three, even if this sort of tomfoolery is happening before now, it simply cannot fly when your pregnant partner is gagging because your child is making her sensitive to smells. The absolute very least you can do is accept that she’s going to sleep in another room.
But, for real my guy: bathe.
