Woman Realizes She & Her Boyfriend Are 'Not On The Same Page' After He Gives Her Drain Opener For Christmas
That's not all he gave her. He also gave her a set of ladles.
Vitalii Matokha / Shutterstock We've all gotten a terrible Christmas gift or two in our day. But the disastrous gift one woman on Reddit got from her boyfriend was bad on a level that has her questioning the entire relationship.
Her boyfriend gave her a drain opener for Christmas, and now she feels like he's taking advantage of her.
Now, to be fair, and in the gent's defense, not all of us are that into Christmas.
I personally could never get another Christmas gift as long as I live and be perfectly fine with it — it's all the other parts of the holidays that light me up like a Christmas tree, not the presents. And that's fine!
But the magnanimity ends there. Because even as stuff-averse as I am, if you hand me a bottle of Drano on Christmas morning? With all due respect, I'm dumping it in your coffee and I don't think there's a judge in the land who'd convict me.
This Redditor didn't get quite that upset, but she was hurt, to say the least, especially since his gift came on the heels of years of a relationship dynamic that left her feeling like she was "carrying the mental load of living together by myself."
The woman pays for everything in their relationship and does everything around their house.
Horrid gifts aside, the woman said her boyfriend is a really good guy at heart who goes out of his way to do favors for his friends. But when it comes to their household, he's left everything on her shoulders.
"I never have asked him for money. Not for rent. Not for utilities. Not for the groceries I always have to buy," she wrote. But even with that generosity, he slacked at every turn.
Even when she asked him to buy toilet paper, she said he bought the "chintzy" small packs from the gas station or, worse still, stole rolls from his office.
Perhaps he's just a cheapskate, or short on money. But it left her feeling overwhelmed. "My apartment is in disarray and I can never get it under control with only me doing any work," she wrote.
And whenever she mentioned it to him, he sheepishly did things in half measures, like, "one sink full of dishes" or DoorDashing takeout at 8:00 at night when she asked him to handle dinner. "It's things like that make me start to resent him and kill my attraction," she wrote. "It hurts my feelings."
When he gave her a drain opener for Christmas, she decided to confront him. It ended their relationship.
"For such a 'nice guy' how can he be so thoughtless?" she wondered. So she decided to level with him. "I told him tonight I feel it would be best if we returned to our old living situation: him at his home, and me alone here."
She told him that she could no longer handle the workload and that on top of it all, "it really hurt my feelings that for Christmas he got me Drano (which he waited to give to me on Christmas meanwhile the sink has been backing up for a month), and a set of ladles." That set of ladles kind of adds insult to injury, doesn't it?
Given how well-meaning he is, she expected some kind of dialogue. Instead, she got nothing. "He just sat there and stared at me," she wrote.
"This was supposed to be my 'best friend,'" she went on to say. "I told him we're breaking up and he needs to go home now." He responded by saying he was "blindsided" and simply took his things and left.
Understandably, many were shocked she'd stayed with him for 2 whole years, and many wondered what she'd seen in him in the first place.
"He was a kind, sensitive, thoughtful, caring guy when I met him," she said in response, and even after the way it ended, she still maintained that he's "a good guy."
Many commenters questioned whether he might be on the autism spectrum, a condition that often causes hardships with reading social situations and other people's emotional needs. She admitted that even he himself wondered the same thing.
But ultimately, many Redditors, as well as the woman herself, felt that the fact her boyfriend gave her a drain opener for Christmas was just a symptom of a bigger and all too common problem: staying in a relationship way too long in hopes that things will change, instead of accepting that you're just not the right fit for each other.
"I guess the takeaway to my failed relationship is to be sure to check in with your partners," she wrote, to make sure "you're both still on the same page." If there's a silver lining here, it's that valuable lesson, aside from the unclogged drain and the nice set of ladles, of course.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.