Roommate Hell·
LOCKED DOOR, BROKEN SLEEP
A sleep-deprived wife battles a partner's chaotic schedule and a relentless Roomba invasion, wondering if locking the bedroom door is the only way to reclaim rest.
Lock the bedroom door or keep it open?
Be one of the first to vote.
The fight started with sleep, then escalated to a Roomba.
A woman who was still asleep at noon asked the internet if she'd be the AH for locking her bedroom door in the morning so she could finally get some rest. Her husband, she said, was on an entirely different schedule: he usually went to bed around midnight or 1 a.m. and was up by 7. She, meanwhile, didn't get to bed until 4, 5, sometimes 6 a.m., and often slept until around noon.
The problem wasn't just the mismatch. It was what happened while she was trying to sleep.
According to the poster, her husband repeatedly came into the bedroom while she was still in bed. "He comes back into the room every 20-30 minutes," she wrote, sometimes with a random comment, sometimes with a random question, and sometimes he would simply stand in the doorway staring. None of it, she said, was urgent. None of it was time sensitive. It was just enough to keep breaking her sleep.
She told him it felt like a passive-aggressive attempt to annoy her into getting up. She said it left her irritated before the day even started. His answer, she wrote, was that "that's not how he means it, so 'it's fine.'"
Then came the morning that pushed the question over the edge.
While she was still sleeping, her husband sent the Roomba into the bedroom. It rattled around, made noise, and banged against things for an hour.
After that, she wondered if the answer was to simply lock the door after he got up. She said there was a second bathroom he could use, so she wouldn't be blocking him from the only one.
Later, she added context. The late schedule, she said, wasn't just preference. "I'm disabled and have chronic pain," she explained. If she lay down before she was actually tired, she would end up lying there in pain, and that had pushed her bedtime later and later.
She also clarified that she didn't work, while her husband was technically still employed but transitioning out and using time off. He only went into the office once every other week.
And when people suggested he might just be lonely, she pushed back on that too. "We're together literally all day," she wrote. "We have ***plenty*** of time together." The few hours in the morning when she was still asleep, she said, were "the most time we spend 'apart.'"
So the question stayed simple: after the Roomba, the interruptions, and the doorway visits, would locking the bedroom door be too far?