NIGHTLIGHTS AND NOISE

A 40-year-old woman says her husband keeps waking her up over and over at night, first with a blinding overhead light, then with phone alerts that go off "at least once or twice a night."

She says sleep is not a small thing in their house. She's health conscious, has a young child, and goes to bed early, "around 9:30." Her 39-year-old husband stays up later, and she says she doesn't mind when he finally comes to bed.

The problem starts the moment he walks in.

Lately, she says, he has begun to "turn the bright overhead light on every time he comes to bed" so he can get ready for sleep. Before that, he used his phone flashlight. Either way, the effect is the same: she wakes up fully, and then has trouble getting back under.

"I'm more fully awake," she wrote, describing the way the room is flooded with light at the worst possible time.

That isn't the only interruption. She says he also refuses to put his phone on do not disturb mode at night. So while she is trying to stay asleep, the phone keeps chirping and buzzing. "It usually goes off at least once or twice a night," she said, and somehow it does not seem to bother him the way it bothers her.

The wakeups have piled up, and so has her frustration. She says she has reached the point where she has yelled at him in the middle of the night.

He doesn't see the issue the same way. According to her, he says she is trying to control him.

That accusation lands in the middle of a conflict that, by her account, has been building for a long time. She said flatly that "sleep has always been an issue between us."

So now the nightly routine is a familiar one: she goes to bed early, hoping for uninterrupted rest. He comes in later. The overhead light snaps on. The phone goes off. She wakes up again. And again. And again.

By the end of her post, the question is straightforward, and it is the only one she asks: "AITA?"