AITAH for letting my boyfriend eat gluten free pasta without telling him it was gluten free
So I keep gluten free pasta in my pantry.
My best friend has celiac and shes over at my place a lot so I always have stuff she can eat. Honestly some of the gluten free stuff is fine and I eat it on my own sometimes because I dont really care that much about the difference.
The other night my boyfriend was at my place and wanted to make dinner. He said he was going to cook some pasta. I said go for it theres a box in the pantry. He grabbed it cooked it made a sauce and everything. We ate it. It was good. Normal evening.
After dinner hes cleaning up and picks up the box to throw it away and sees that it says gluten free on the front. And he just stops. Looks at me and goes did you know this was gluten free.
I said yeah thats what I had in the pantry. He got genuinely upset. Said I should have told him before he cooked it. I said it was literally written on the box that he picked up and opened and poured into the pot himself. He said he didnt look at it closely and that I knew what was in my own pantry and should have warned him.
Warned him. About pasta.
He said it was basically food tampering. He actually used that phrase. I thought he was joking and I laughed and that made it worse. He said Im not taking his feelings seriously and that he has a right to know what hes putting in his body. Which like yes obviously but its pasta. Its not an allergen for him. Hes not gluten intolerant. He just doesnt like the idea of eating gluten free food because he thinks its weird health nut stuff.
He left that night kind of cold and has been weird about it since.
I keep going over it in my head and I cant find the part where I did something wrong. He grabbed it himself. He opened it himself. He cooked it himself. The label was right there. But now I feel like Im being gaslit into thinking I owe him an apology for not narrating the contents of my pantry before he cooked dinner.
AITAH
to be continued story :
“AITA for telling my husband he can’t be friends with the woman he cheated on me with?”
I (40F) have been with my husband (46M) for 7.5 years and we got married in September. Last April, I became aware of him having had an emotional affair with a female friend of his. This friend was a hookup of his 20 years ago, but since then they have just been friends. I don’t think they hooked up while we were engaged/married.
But, this friend of his would often confide in him about her relationships, go into detail about her private life, advise him on how to improve his relationship with me, etc. They also both admit to having a flirty dynamic in their friendship, e.g. him telling her that she excites him, etc.
What triggered me finding out about this was him going to her house after work one day, ignoring my texts/calls while he was there, and not admitting that he was at her house for 9 days. She gave him mushrooms and he was at her house for 2 hours.
Both of them swear up and down that they didn’t sleep together, and I believe that, though my husband keeping it from me for 9 days made me wonder if he was hiding something. He alleges he was only hiding him having taken mushrooms, since I disapproved of him doing that.
This prompted me to go through his texts with her, though everything had been deleted except one week’s worth of texts. I know there was a lot more because I would often see that he was texting her, yet there were barely any texts once I got ahold of his phone.
He admitted to deleting most everything because I would be bothered if I had read the messages. He deleted his entire Facebook seemingly to hide evidence. The few texts I did read were questionable enough to cause concern. Him talking to her about them having had epic times when he was at her house. Her talking about how she felt so much better after having slept with some guy.
Her asking him if she was prettier than another girl. Him liking a photo she sent, but the photo itself was deleted. Them having late night conversations about their relationships while I sat alone and neglected in the other room.
I was understandably upset over all of this, and when my husband saw how upset I was, he made the choice to cut her out of his life. That was the right choice, IMO. Our relationship improved without her sucking up all his attention. We got married, and I got pregnant with our second child. In her absence I felt he truly re-committed to me.
Then, just a couple days ago, she messaged me. She said “this is bullshit, I miss you guys so much.” And by that she meant my husband and our daughter. She said she felt like she lost a brother when she lost my husband’s friendship, and that it hurt to be discarded. She sent a selfie of her crying.
All she did was focus on how hurt she was, without acknowledging the part she played in damaging my relationship with my husband. There were no apologies, no acknowledgement of responsibility. She didn’t seem to get what I was saying about their friendship crossing boundaries and being inappropriate.
She even asked if the issue was more me not trusting him vs. not trusting her, and I didn’t have the heart to say that from what I could tell in the chats I read, it was more often HER that perpetuated the flirty dynamic and my husband was seemingly just going along with that.
For a minute I felt like, maybe I should forgive her. She said if they were friends again they could avoid flirty stuff. For a moment I thought, maybe that’s a start? Then I realized I would never be able to police all their interactions to feel sufficiently reassured that they were behaving themselves, so this was a recipe for disaster.
I reflected on our convo for a couple days and came to the conclusion that I cannot feel safe having in our lives. Our marriage improved so much without her interfering with our connection. The only benefit of her being around is that she sometimes watches our daughter.
I’m happy to pay a babysitter a pretty penny if it means I don’t have to let her toxic ass back into our lives to threaten my relationship with my husband again. Occasional babysitting is not a good reason to let her into our lives again.
In our conversation she kind of wandered off-topic and started talking about things I really didn’t care about that were very personal from her private life. And when I’d respond, she wouldn’t say much back.
It was seemingly performative, as if she was trying to elicit sympathy or keep the conversation centered on HER pain, while erasing any pain I felt when she carried on an emotional affair with my husband.
To this day, both she and my husband deny that they really did anything wrong because they never slept together. I disagree. And them not realizing they did anything wrong is exactly why I think their friendship is too dangerous to allow to continue.
Could this person safely be friends with my husband again in the future, possibly if boundaries were maintained about their conversations not being flirty? I should note I considered this woman a friend of mine as well; I genuinely liked her until I saw how manipulative, egotistical, and nymphomaniacal she is. She was nice to me but I feel it was mostly just to keep my husband close to her. AITA?
This is what people had to say to OP:
Zokieiei022 said:
NTA. Ma’am… he told another woman she gives him a boner and we’re debating “friendship”? Be so serious. If you have to delete texts, delete Facebook, ignore your wife for 9 days, and take mushrooms at your ex-hookup’s house… that is not a wholesome sibling vibe. That’s a soft launch of bad decisions.
Also her sliding into your DMs crying about how she “misses you guys”?? Respectfully, she doesn’t miss you. She misses access. Your marriage improved when she was gone. That’s the only data you need.
You’re not banning him from having friends. You’re saying he can’t keep the one friend he had an emotional affair with. That’s not controlling that’s common sense. If a “friendship” needs this many disclaimers and supervision, it doesn’t need to exist.
Original_Cranberry68 said:
Talk to your husband .. ask him to reflect on how your life has been without her.. if he thinks it’s bad then you know this isn’t salvageable .. he will run to her like a puppy.. You can be candid with her that you don’t see their relationship as a sibling.. it might be emotional cheating You dot have to avoid social circles but no exclusive connects
OP responded:
He is happy without her around. He’s not pushing to be friends with her again, but I’m sure if I weren’t in the picture he would be in contact with her again. He did say once or twice that he missed her, wondered how her kids were doing, etc. But I basically responded to that with, too bad. And he didn’t say anything more about it after that.
boundaries4546 said:
Oh they definitely slept together.
truth_fairy78 said:
She’s reaching out to you asking for permission to bring her crazy back into your life and you’re actually considering it?? What is wrong with you?
NTA, but you would be if you fell for her BS.
Civil-Clue-7129 said:
They are both snakes in the grass.
OP responded:
I would agree with that.
And UserNotFound23498 said:
Yes. ESH. You suck, because you are even thinking/considering this.
He sucks: because he did it. She sucks: because she is manipulating all of you. Wake up. Cut her off. Block her. Warn him to block her too, if he ever talks to her again; tell him it’s immediate divorce
