Woman called genius for the way she dealt with lazy boyfriend who pretended to be bad at chores

Editor's note: This article was originally published on November 15, 2021. It has since been updated.

When men find ways to avoid doing housework they can be quite innovative about it, but this one genius of a woman put her foot down without confrontation, and Reddit's loving her for it. The woman shared the incident on Reddit, revealing that her boyfriend was pretending to be bad at basic chores including doing dishes and laundry in order to avoid doing them at all. "My boyfriend has started pretending to be bad at basic life shit like dishes and laundry like he can't do it so I do it," she wrote. 

"I felt pretty frustrated with that and told him straight up that I knew he didn't forget how to clean since he moved in with me; he was always very competent living alone and I didn't appreciate him 'forgetting' how to do chores," she wrote. "I said that when I asked him to do dishes and he refused and refused until he finally did them wrong, that I was not that stupid."

Her boyfriend tried to act all innocent and feigned ignorance when questioned on deliberately messing up every chore. "He said that he was trying his best and I was wrong for saying he was trying to manipulate me. And that from his perspective I asked him to do something and he did it the best he could and I kept at him because it wasn't up to my impossibly high standards and he couldn't win... And he wanted me to believe him when he says he is trying," she added. 

She then turned the tables on him, and started being as inefficient as him, and even worse on some occasions. "He had bleach stained my favorite little black dress. Instead of getting mad, next time he had a family event, I put it on. He asked me if I was really going to wear that, it looked messy. I said that I loved that dress and understand accidents happen so I wasn't mad or upset it had bleach spots, actually. I thought it looked kinda cool," she wrote. "He said he really thought it looked bad and I said if he wants he could sharpie on the white spots real quick in the Uber. It ended up looking even worse."

She carried on with her act, just as he had done all along. "We were having dinner and he had done the dishes, but put some of the cups and bowls in the dishwasher upside down so they filled with dirty dishwater. I took those cups and bowls, dumped them out in the sink but didn't wash them further, and served his food in them. He said that it was dirty and I was like 'They just came out of the dishwasher! It's just water, it's fine.' He said that no it was disgusting, and I said it was really no biggie, I was getting over my impossibly high cleanliness standards and I really didn't think it was that gross," she added.

She matched his passive-aggressive pettiness stride for stride. "The last time, I had cooked for a work party of his. After cooking, the dish needed to cool for about 30 minutes then be refrigerated. I had plans with my friends that night and I asked him to put the dish away after it cooled. He forgot. The next morning he noticed the dish was never refrigerated. I said it was fine, it was just a mistake, and it would probably be fine to eat, there wasn't a lot of meat in it," she wrote.

"He got frustrated and said that you can't serve meat left out overnight even if it is "only a little" and I said "oh I think it should be okay, stuff happens," she wrote. He appeared to catch on and changed his ways. "He's stopped being so lazy about chores after he realized I seem totally okay with leaving stuff done badly and that he'll be living with it. But I feel a little petty for having been dishonest about it. I actually hate how my bleached dress looked and my stomach turns at dirty dish soup and unrefrigerated meat," she wrote, asking if she did the wrong thing.

Reddit completely backed her and even hailed her a genius for her approach. "He played and he lost. Too bad for him," wrote one person. Many even called on her to dump him. Another wrote, "He was manipulating you into you doing everything, but once he realized you weren't going to play along and be his mommy, he decided to be an adult. It was a learning experience, not being petty."