AITAH for putting my sleep needs above my husband’s convenience?
Husband and I (30s) have been married for a few years now. We’ve both had issues with some of each other’s sleeping habits the entirety of our marriage. I’ve changed the habits which directly impact his sleep when he brought it to me as an issue. He has refused to even consider my issues with his habits as even a serious issue.
For example, I had a habit of playing soothing sleep music on my phone while going to bed to help me fall asleep. I had a timer set for it to turn off an hour into playing but apparently he couldn’t fall asleep with it playing. I ended up changing it to watching something soothing instead without sound so it wouldn’t disturb him. On the other hand, he had a habit of having the dog sleep in the bed with us.
The dog would jump on my head at all hours of the night and wake me up in a panic. Multiple times each night. I was getting less than 3 hours of sleep effectively each night and started to develop anxiety. It took nearly a year for him to take me seriously and have the dog sleep outside of our room in his own bed.
Over the past few years, my patience for convincing him something is a big deal to me has been dwindling. Recently, we got a new comforter set because he kept complaining about the old one having a weird smell. I couldn’t tell you what was smelling weird about it all of a sudden but he has a heightened sense of smell compared to most.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been woken up multiple times each night by the chattering of my own teeth and my feet completely numb because he keeps turning on the A/C in the middle of the winter and pulling the entire comforter onto himself in his sleep.
I told him my issue multiple times and each time he told me that if he turns on the heater at the set temperature, his nose gets really dry. I asked him to not keep pulling the comforter all to himself and he told me that he can’t control something he does in his sleep and i should feel free to pull it back if he keeps doing that, completely missing the point that to do so, i’ll still need to be woken up by freezing to death multiple times each night and not getting the sleep I need to function.
I got tired of arguing with him and trying to get him to see why this is an issue for me and took it into my own hands. I started going to bed a bit later, after he’s asleep and turning on the heater instead to 70 (he sets the A/C to 65), and I got out our old comforter and started using that instead. When he started complaining about it, I told him that since he’s refused to care about my quality of sleep, I’ve decided to take care of my issues in my own way.
He called me an AH because he always thinks of my comfort and wellbeing with other things. I told him I gave him a fair chance to find a solution together but he couldn’t be bothered, but now I’m wondering if I am being an AH because he does actually consider my comfort and wellbeing with most other things (food, work, relaxation, hobbies, etc).
