Malicious Compliance·
INSIDE-OUT TUG OF WAR
After years of doing laundry for his fiancée who hates folding, a 38-year-old man weighs stopping the inside-out routine to see if she finally corrects the habit.
Should he keep fixing the clothes?
Be one of the first to vote.
He is fed up with turning his fiancée's clothes right side out, and he is thinking about stopping.
The poster, 38, says his fiancée is 37 and "HATES doing laundry," so he usually takes it on himself. He handles the washing, then folds everything and puts it away. But there is one small request he has been making over and over: for the 6 years they've been together, he has asked her to "please flip her clothes right side out before putting them in the hamper."
She keeps not doing it.
According to him, she "continually forgets or otherwise doesn't do it," and that leaves him stuck with the same chore every time the laundry is done. He says he ends up flipping "literally 90% of her clothes" before he can hang them up or fold them. What started as a simple ask has become a regular irritation, one that follows every load from the hamper to the closet.
Now he is wondering if he would be the asshole for changing the routine. Instead of fixing her clothes himself, he wants to "just put them up as they are, thereby forcing her to flip them before wearing them." In other words: if the shirts, pants, and socks go into the drawer inside out, then she will have to deal with them when she gets dressed.
He admits the issue may sound small. He even calls it "not a big deal." But after years of the same request and the same result, he says he is done with the extra work. In his view, "she's a grown woman who is perfectly capable of doing it," and he is "tired of asking with no result."
That is the whole fight: not a giant blowup, not some dramatic betrayal, just a domestic grind that has gone on for years. One partner hates laundry and hands it off. The other keeps doing it, and keeps getting stuck with the same inside-out clothes. Now he wants to see what happens if he simply stops fixing them.
He says he is "willing to accept judgement either way."