AITA for telling my wife that blaming my snoring for her insomnia is a cop out?
For the past week, my wife has been shaking me awake to tell me that I’m snoring and that she can’t sleep. I have been wearing nasal strips for years, and she would occasionally do this, but this week it has been multiple times per night every night.
She has been stressed out at work lately, and finally earlier tonight I addressed the elephant in the room. Unfortunately, it didn’t go according to plan, and now my wife is upset.
After waking me up for the second time, my wife told me that my strips are “no longer working” and that I would need to look for another solution. I tried reasoning with her. I said that I had used these for years without incident and that I find it very unlikely that they suddenly stopped working. She said that my snoring was “worse than ever” and said that maybe I should get a sleep study done.
This was so ridiculous that I couldn’t let it go. I told her that she was using my snoring as an excuse and that her real concern was stress at her job due to poor performance. How do I know this? She complains about work over dinner every night and how her boss is so unreasonable. To be clear, I don’t think she is totally incompetent at work (only in some ways). She just has a demanding manager, but it has nothing to do with me. All I do is share a bed with her.
You should have seen my wife’s reaction. She went nuts. She said that I was being patronizing and “dismissing her,” and that I was in denial. This was so hilarious that I laughed out loud. After all, the entire time that I was snoring I had been asleep.
If my snoring was that big of a problem, didn’t she think I would have woken myself up? This was the last straw for my wife. She said that I needed to “leave immediately,” and I’ve been in the guest room ever since.
I really don’t think I’ve been treated fairly at any point here. I have been forced to sleep on an uncomfortable bed and in a different part of the house, and for what? So that my wife can continue to live in denial about why she can’t sleep? I am kicking myself for not bringing up that I paid for half of our mattress.
It would have been a solid argument. Anyway, I don’t know what else I can do at this point except recommend she either resign or see a shrink (maybe both). What do you all think? Did I screw up? AITA?
