Being a good partner means showing up for family, but that family should also make room for you when you get there.

When a woman who had spent years sleeping on a painful couch during family visits found out the guest room was suddenly freed up for other relatives, she finally put her foot down.

But when she announced Easter was the year she stayed home, her partner’s family accused her of being overly dramatic.

Keep reading for the full story.

AITA for not wanting to spend Easter with my partner’s family, because they make us sleep on the couch?

I have been with my partner for almost a decade.

He has two sisters.

She describes the sisters.

One of them (let’s call her Alice) has one adult and one late-teen kid who both live at home. They have a house in a small town around 5 hours from us by car.

The other sister (let’s call her Beata) has two dogs, one of which has random outbursts of aggression because it came from a bad environment.

They see these sisters on special occasions.

We visit Alice regularly for Christmas, Easter (they’re religious, so it’s an important holiday for them), their kids’ birthdays (they have birthdays close to each other, so we celebrate both at the same time), and randomly during the year.

Visiting them is usually a fairly big time commitment.

Since it’s quite far, we also often sleep over there, and they always try to convince us to stay as long as we can.

My partner then convinces me to “just stay one more day.”

The accommodations are anything but luxurious.

However, they also always make us sleep on the couch. They technically have one guest room, but that one is always occupied by Beata, her husband, and their dogs.

And Beata tends to visit at the same time as us.

There are many downsides to sleeping on the couch.

As for sleeping on the couch, the issue is not just that it’s uncomfortable — which it is.

It’s super soft, my back hurts after the first night, and I keep waking up because of the rib and back pain.

We also never have any privacy, because the entire family is in the living room the entire day. They are also very loud and constantly in your business.

I need some time to recharge from them, but there is no space.

Plus there are always three dogs running around which I can’t hide from.

Then there’s the matter of conflicting routines.

And the last issue is that I tend to go to bed around 10 in the evening, while they will happily stay up talking way past midnight.

Despite asking them numerous times to let me unfold the couch and go to sleep, they keep postponing it for hours.

The arrangement is starting to feel really unfair.

Since we can never sleep in the guest room, we can also never bring our cats with us and need to hire a sitter.

Beata can’t hire a sitter for her dogs because of the aggressive one, so despite earning like triple what we do, we are the ones who need to pay for pet sitting.

So as Easter approaches, they begin to weigh their plans.

So anyway, we were supposed to go visit them this Easter and stay there from Thursday until Monday evening.

However, as I’ve also learned today, Alice’s brother-in-law and his wife and kid will be coming to visit them from abroad.

To accommodate them, Alice’s kids will share one of their rooms and Alice’s brother-in-law will stay with his family in the other one. Like, suddenly that’s possible.

This time, she tries to negotiate better conditions, but she’s always rejected.

I’ve asked numerous times before if we could not sleep on the couch, because it hurts my back and I can’t sleep properly, and the answer was always no because there’s no space.

So she finally just refuses to go altogether.

So I’ve told my partner that I’m simply staying at home with our cats.

My partner does understand my reasoning, but to him family always comes first, so he is still trying to convince me to go.

The family, however, doesn’t approve of this decision.

He had a video call with his family today, and while I didn’t participate in it, I heard it from the other room.

They basically think I’m spoiled and stirring up drama.

At this point, staying home seems like the best choice for her.

What did Reddit think?

Her partner is sending an important message here.

It’s clear her partner’s family doesn’t respect her or her boundaries.

If it were this commenter, they’d never stay with this family again.

There’s no point in staying somewhere she knows she’ll be miserable.

She drove five hours, paid for pet sitting she shouldn’t have needed, and woke up in pain every morning — and the family’s response to her finally saying no was to call her dramatic?

It’s hard to feel welcomed when this is how you’re treated.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.