Single Man Can’t Cook And Can’t Afford Takeout, But Since He Knows His Neighbor Can Cook, He Thought She Might Want To Share With Him

Ben Auxier

5 months ago

Shutterstock/Reddit

I’m not a cook. I don’t come from a family of cooks. I envy those who are good at it, for me it’s all just very provincial.

Still, I don’t think I’d have ever done what this guy did.

I think I’d die of embarrassment before having this kind of neighborly cooking encounter.

However, he doesn’t think his request was odd at all. In fact, he thinks his neighbor is the one being unreasonable.

Let’s see what’s going on.

AITA for asking a neighbor if she wanted to share food?

I’m a 31 year old single guy who lives alone in an apartment complex.

I’ve lived there for 6 years.

My neighbor across the hall, a woman around my age or a little younger (I actually don’t know her first name but I’ll call her Katie) lives across the hall from me diagonally and has for about 2 years.

We exchange hellos but aren’t friendly, which is how it is with most of my neighbors.

He shares his current eating situation.

So I don’t know how to cook, and due to losing one of my part time gigs, I don’t have as much money for takeout anymore.

I’m getting really sick of eating cheap fast food or box mac and cheese.

I’m gaining weight and I never feel great.

He had an idea that involved a big favor from Katie.

This is where Katie comes in.

I can always smell her cooking in the hall and it always smells amazing (I know it isn’t the other person at our end of our hall cause it’s a single old man).

I’ve even complimented it a few times.

So I got the idea that I’d offer to give her some money each week to cook a little extra and bring it over to me (or I can pick it up from her!) at night.

She’s cooking anyway and then I’d have varied presumably delicious food.

Katie didn’t see it that way.

I asked her the next time I saw her and she looked surprised and said she couldn’t because she was too busy (which didn’t make sense cause she cooks almost every day but okay).

The next time I saw her a few days later, I asked her if she was sure and upped the amount I was offering.

And she said she was sure and that it was rude to ask me, and that she isn’t a housekeeper for hire and I should get a housekeeper if that’s what I want.

She also called me ‘a stranger’ even though we have talked in the halls before.

He thinks Katie is being unreasonable.

Overall she made me feel like a big jerk and really embarrassed for even asking her, and a little mad because she was acting like I was being creepy (I wasn’t, trust me, she isn’t my type).

I think asking her to split cooking wasn’t completely outlandish, since she cooks every day anyway and it wouldn’t be hard to make a little more.

So, AITA?

Here’s the thing. Usually in these posts, there’s some amount of ambiguity for the evaluators to parse out. This time, though?

Reddit was clearly against him.

This person pointed out that there was no doubt that OP was in the wrong.