Woman Throws Away Dishes Rather than Wash Them despite Her Roommate, a Single Mom, Not Affording New Ones

A 28-year-old woman began throwing dirty dishes away instead of washing them because she couldn't stand the smell. She wondered if she was taking it too far to get her roommate to see sense.

The Reddit user and her 29-year-old roommate, a single mother to an eight-month-old, had been living together for a while with the agreement that the woman's roommate would use her kitchen items.

The woman's roommate could not afford to buy her own cups, bowls, plates, and other kitchen items, and since the woman already had all these things before they moved in, they agreed that her roommate would use hers.

For a while, this arrangement worked perfectly. However, when the woman's roommate began feeding her baby from the bowls she had brought into the home, they ran into a problem that led the woman to take drastic measures.

Why Did the Woman Throw Her Dishes Out?

When the woman and her roommate moved in together, her roommate's baby was "exclusively bottle-fed." However, when the woman took to Reddit for advice, the child had begun eating solids.

The woman's roommate had begun preparing rice or oat cereal for her child each day, the smell of which the woman could not stand. She admitted that she had even thrown up from the smell of the food before but didn't mind since she knew her roommate's child had to eat.

The issue cropped up when the roommate did not wash the dishes after feeding her child. The woman's roommate would prepare the food, feed half of it to her child, and leave the other half in the sink.

After being in the sink for a couple of hours, the food became so hard that the dishwasher could not clean the bowls correctly. The woman was then forced to clean the bowls because her roommate had her hands full caring for her child.

The woman asked her roommate to rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, but she didn't, and when the woman suggested that her roommate buy her child plastic bowls, she told the woman she couldn't afford them.

After a month of having these conversations, the woman began throwing the dishes out instead of cleaning them. She admitted they had no bowls left and that her roommate couldn't prepare her child's food on a plate. She shared:

"She's started using my cups to make [oatmeal], and I'll be throwing those away, too. It is nothing to me to replace these things, and when I do, I'll be keeping them hidden."

While the woman was determined not to do the dirty dishes and instead to throw them out and buy her own that would not be available to her roommate, she asked if she was going overboard with the situation.

What Did People Say?

One person told the woman that while she was not unreasonable in expecting her roommate to do the dishes, she could also not throw them out each time her roommate left them in the sink. The commenter advised the woman to reconsider her living situation.

Another commenter suggested that the woman and her roommate converse about it like adults. She could reconsider everything if her roommate still did not understand why she needed to do her dishes.

Many disagreed with the above comment, saying that the woman had already tried numerous times to talk to her roommate without success and that it was not her responsibility to have these discussions continually.

Some people thought the woman was indirectly harming herself because she threw the dishes that she would need away, causing herself to spend more money on replacing the dishes. They said:

"I would suggest getting a separate set of dishes for her, but with the issue being that she won't wash them, that won't solve the problem."

Most commenters talked about how entitled the woman's roommate was and said that the woman should try washing the bowls and hiding them from her roommate instead of throwing them away.

One commenter suggested that the woman go out and buy her roommate some paper bowls for her baby's food and tell her that she would stop using the other dishes for her baby's meals.

Similarly to this woman wanting her roommate to take care of her dishes, another woman wanted her son to do his chores and punished him when he didn't. However, the boy's father was unhappy. Read the full story here.