When you move in with a new roommate it can take some time to get used to each other’s personalities and habits.

Sometimes, however, the person you are living with claims to want to be better, but has some very annoying habits that they don’t ever change.

That is the situation that the roommate in this story is in, and he doesn’t know how to deal with his new roommate being so messy and always eating his food.

AITA for “infantilizing” my roommate?

Hi all, I (24M) have been having an increasingly grating time with my roommate (26M) and his habits regarding to shared chores & food resources.

Getting used to a new roommate can be difficult.

Since we’ve moved in, I was trying to get him to eat better & learn how to cook [ETA: He requested this help. I didn’t force this randomly].

He’s a self-proclaimed vegetarian, has autism related texture issues, & refuses to eat certain staple foods because it reminds him of bad stuff.

It seems like he is trying to be very helpful.

I’m not mad at that, I’ve hand-picked recipes working around those restrictions. I’ve showed him ~8 times now how to do the same recipe, then written it physically, digitally and even offered to record a video of me making it.

Something simple, & quick for something that would feed him for days.

Ok, maybe he really doesn’t want the help.

He hasn’t attempted once. Even stuff I’ve pre-cut for him to cook with ends up just being shoved to back of the fridge for me to find molded over when I’m cleaning.

I gave up.

He clearly just likes cheap and simple foods.

Now, though, he goes through entire sleeves of bread in less than 30 hours with nothing more than PB on it, eats entire boxes of crackers and cereal, family sized packages of oatmeal, sometimes even all the fresh fruit we buy.

Usually in such short time spans it feels like I can’t enjoy anything without feeling some sort of rush to get there first. (We buy groceries with pooled together money).

Maybe they need to separate their groceries.

It wouldn’t be so grating if he just would take the time out of his day to replace the things he eats up when he’s the one with more free time.

He’s even done it to things that are expressly mine & he’s done it to my baking.

Wow, he really must have loved this dish.

The first time I made milk bread I had just pulled the two loaves out from the oven to rest overnight to enjoy in the morning. By the time I woke up there was maybe 3 slices left of one loaf.

I’m not sure how he didn’t get sick. I’m not, like, fat shaming him either. He’s rail thin – I’m the fat one.

This is good advice.

I’ve told him often he needs to eat REAL meals, so he isn’t constantly going back into the kitchen every 30 minutes still hungry. Spoken from experience.

But once he finally DOES cook something proper to eat, he leaves a MESS. The inside of our cabinets are stained with soy sauce and sticky honey.

This is just unacceptable.

I’ve had to get uncooked rice out of my flour, sugar, and my dog’s water bowl. He doesn’t clean after himself. I could leave it like that for days and he wouldn’t care or notice. He also routinely dumps rice *into the sink* and not the garbage.

I remind him constantly, near daily, to PLEASE stop that. I can even count how many times he’s done the dishes on one hand since the beginning of this year.

Come on, nobody likes doing dishes. You just have to do them anyway.

His reasoning is that he just doesn’t like how it feels, or he just didn’t think about it. He won’t even take out the garbage or clean his cat’s litter until it I ask him to or remind him, or it gets so bad he *has* to.

I’ve already talked to my roommate about why I’m upset with him and his only response was sort of like “I will try to remember to do XYZ” (not even a hardline “I will do better”) and “I know you care about me, but you don’t need to infantilize me”.

Yikes, this sounds like a terrible situation.

That’s been bothering me. AITA?

Honestly, to me it seems like he very much does need to infantilize his roommate, and he isn’t doing it enough!

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

Exactly, he needs to take a step back.

I agree with this commenter.

He is an adult and needs to act like one.

This person says to stop being his mom.

This is exactly what is happening.

Just stop ‘helping’ him and force him to grow up.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.