Wife Refuses to Pick Up Husband’s Trash After He Tells Her She’s ‘Supposed to’ Do It

A woman turns to the Reddit community for support after a household disagreement over something as simple as trash spirals into a battle of principle between her and her husband. 

The 34-year-old wife explains that she used to quietly pick up the garbage her 35-year-old husband left on the counter every day, until one exchange changed everything.

“I thought that this wasn’t that big of a deal – he just forgot,” she writes. But when she finally asked, “Why do you keep putting the trash here? The trash can is empty, and only a step away,” her husband’s irritated response left her stunned.

According to her, his reaction wasn’t just forgetfulness but entitlement. “He told me, in an annoyed voice, that I can put the trash there myself, if it bothers me,” she recalls. 

What cut deeper than the trash itself was the expectation that she should be the one to pick it up, no questions asked. 

She explains that she has never believed it’s acceptable to expect someone else to deal with her mess. “As far back as I can remember, never have I ever expected someone to pick up trash after me, and I 100% have never commanded someone else to do so,” she says. Even if they had a housekeeper, she insists she would never speak in such a way.

But her husband argues otherwise. She shares that “he says that I’m ‘supposed to’ pick up his trash because he picks things up after me ‘all the time,’ and I ‘don’t pick up after him.’ ” 

She pushes back, noting that she is no messier than him, and points out how frequently she ends up cleaning the clutter he leaves behind. She has even started a drawer of items her husband has abandoned around the house, ones she feels are unsafe for their children. 

“I gathered a whole drawer of things that are dangerous for our kids, that he left out all kinds of places,” she explains. The list includes used gloves, screws, tape and scraps of wood that she says were left lying around the hallway.

She recalls a recent morning in which the problem was on full display from the start of her day. “I started my day by hiding the expensive digital thermometer he had left out on the counter – if our toddler gets hold of it, he likes to bang things with it, and can ruin it,” she shares. 

After that, she says she closed the dishwasher her husband had left open, which their child had once climbed into while waving a sharp knife.

Her list continues with small but frustrating oversights. “Then I closed the jar of sugar that the toddler had gotten into just the day before (my husband left it open), spreading sugar all over the table, floor, a couple of chairs and himself (which I cleaned),” she writes. 

“Tossed an empty toilet paper roll. Tossed an empty bag of fried onion (the trash can was only half way full). Tidied bed sheets that my husband had just put in the middle of the living room,” she adds. 

Feeling like her concerns were being dismissed, she decided she needed to take a stand. Out of principle, she says, she now refuses to pick up the specific pieces of trash her husband insists on leaving on the counter. “He has to work on this bad habit,” she explains, adding that she feels he needs to act like an adult and stop expecting her to do it for him.

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Her husband, however, has taken the same approach from the other side. “He, out of principle, keeps gathering even more of this trash on the counter,” she says. She notes that this isn’t the first time they’ve clashed over the exact same issue.

She eventually told her husband she would bring the situation to Reddit to see what others had to say. “So, I told my husband I’d make a thread here and see what people think,” she shares, inviting feedback from strangers.

One commenter raises the possibility that her husband might be using the trash as some sort of statement, asking, “He’s using trash to make a point. Why? What point does he think he’s making?” 

Her reply is simple and exasperated. “I don’t know. As far as I know, he hasn’t managed to formulate one either,” she responds. “I told him that the only point he’s making is that he indeed wants to show that he’s expecting others to pick up his trash.”