Sharing space with another person can lead to a lot of expected and unexpected complications. If the people sharing space are all adults, one area of possible concern is dating and sexual relations.
During college, people use signals like leaving something on the doorknob to alert their roommate that they’re entertaining a sexual partner. But once the dorm is replaced by an apartment or home, accommodating a roommate’s needs is actually a little more complicated.
Communication and consideration are key.
A roommate dealing with issues of miscommunication and a lack of consideration turned to the “Am I The A**hole” (AITA) subReddit for feedback.
Biiatrizes asked:
“AITA for asking my roommate to close the door when she’s having sex?”
The original poster (OP) explained:
“Me (21, female) and my roommate (28, female) have been living together for about eight months now and we get along really well. We’ve had some issues, admittedly, because I am way messier than she is.”
“I always thought that we had good communication, though, and we have seemed to talk it out, mostly reaching a conclusion. During these 8 months, my boyfriend (23, male) has come around the house many times.”
“Every time he sleeps over, I make sure she has no problems the night before and always ask her if we are being loud. We have never had a problem with him coming over before.”
“Today, my roommate brought over the guy she is seeing. He has been around a bit, and I don’t really mind it usually.”
“Today, however, they came home when I was sleeping (seasonal depression has me sleeping at 8:30pm), and I woke up to the sound of them having sex. This has never happened before, and I decided to go outside to give them more privacy.”
“On my way out, I noticed that her door was wide open. When I got outside, I texted her this: ‘hey… sorry to say this but can you please close your door? I can hear everything. I came outside now but if you can, please’.”
“I don’t know what I expected, but she simply replied, ‘sorry I never told you when you were too noisy with your visits’.”
“I immediately felt horrible and apologized, and said you could have said something before and she just says, ‘OK. I try to be more understanding’.”
“I didn’t mean to embarrass her, but I literally woke up to the sound of them. I just thought maybe she could close the door, which she has in the past, but now she says she can’t because of the cat.”
“I think I should have just put on some music and not said anything, but I just didn’t think it would be a big deal. I always thought she would also tell me if/when I make her uncomfortable.”
“My boyfriend said I’m not in the wrong, but maybe I shouldn’t have texted her while they were still having sex.”
“AITA?”
The OP later added:
“I have seem a lot of people baffled by the idea of leaving the door open when having sex and I would have to agree. But I think it’s fair to state that she said she had to keep the door open because of her cat.”
“If she closes it, the cat can’t walk around or use her litter box, so that is why.”
The OP summed up their situation.
“Am I the a**hole for asking my roommate if she can close the door when she has sex with her boyfriend?
“I might be the a**hole for bringing it up to her when she says she has had to deal with the same from me before and was understanding enough to not bring it up.”
Redditors weighed in by declaring:
- NTA – Not The A**hole
- YTA – You’re The A**hole
- NAH – No A**holes Here
- ESH – Everyone Sucks Here
Redditors decided the OP was not the a**hole (NTA).
“NTA. When you are in a shared house, you don’t have sex with your door open. Simple courtesy.” ~ SushiGuacDNA
“NTA. You asked her. Repeatedly, and she told you, you weren’t too noisy. Was she lying then or now? Either way, that’s not your fault.”
“Also close the door when you’re having sex is basic common sense and basic courtesy. Why on earth wouldn’t she?” ~ KatTheKonqueror
“To not close the door is exhibitionism. Of course, I don’t want to be included in someone else’s sex! Jesus where is the common decency‽‽” ~ buggywtf
“NTA. It’s not okay to do this. It’s a breach of consent, but I think people are missing out on what’s actually going on here.”
“This person is admittedly dirty, and the roommate hates it. She’s also dealing with depression and sleeping during the day.”
“Let me make it clear that I don’t think any of these things are good enough reasons to breach somebody’s consent by having sex with your door wide open, but they do make for bad blood in a lot of roommate situations.”
“So it’s not acceptable, BUT I’m just trying to say that I’m pretty sure this is purposeful. This is the type of behavior somebody does when they are trying to drive their roommate out.”
“It seems they are extremely angry about the persistent messiness and while the messy person feels they have ‘talked it out’, the person dealing with the messes definitely does not feel that way.”
“It also sounds like the clean roommate has trouble addressing things directly & being honest about what bothers them, even when asked.”
“Again, I’m not saying this is an acceptable thing to do. But I am saying that I think people are missing the motivation that may be behind these actions.”
“It doesn’t appear to be sexual so much as it appears to be pointedly wanting to irritate the messy roommate and potentially get her to leave. These girls are not friends.”
“Clean roommate is sick of her. I think she’s trying to drive her out.” ~ BojackTrashMan
“NTA. Next time, close the door yourself, while making eye contact, to assert dominance!”
“Seriously though, NTA. Sounds like your roommate is an exhibitionist.” ~ rcbs
“The cat will survive without the litter box for a few hours, if that, for her to get some. Tell her to close the door. NTA.” ~ notyourmartyr
“NTA. Even if what she said was true, there’s a difference between loud visits and loud sex noises. If you’re into that, then there’s no problem, but if it makes you uncomfortable then she should oblige since not everyone shares her freaky nature.” ~ Funny80ne
“Not to pry but are you guys loud? Like is there a chance she hears you guys with the door closed?”
“Like everyone keeps saying she might be reacting to the messes, but is it possible that she’s spent the last 6 months listening to you loudly have sex through a thin wall and thought she’d return the favor?”
“Many years ago, I was living with a friend and her 20-year-old daughter. I was like 26 at the time. My friend was in her 40s and had daughter young.”
“It was a temp situation and I was sleeping on their couch. I was only supposed to be there for a few weeks, but it became a few months. My friend was fine with it, but I always felt like her daughter resented me being there and I didn’t blame her, she went from living alone with her mom to having a weird guy there.”
“A couple of months into me staying there, daughter started dating a new guy, and he started staying over from time to time. The way the house was set up, daughter’s room was on one side, mom’s room was on the other.”
“One night, I woke up to LOUD sex. Like, I cannot overstate how loud this was. It wasn’t like, an occasional moan. I could hear skin slapping sounds, I could hear occasional a** slaps, the bed hitting the wall, her telling him exactly what she needed, the whole nine.”
“It actually took me a second to wake up fully and understand what I was hearing. I’ll admit, in my 20s and it being quite some time since I’d been laid, I listened longer than I probably should have, with a mixture of arousal, embarrassment, and shock.”
“This was a women who was a good bit younger than me, but was an adult. I’d never really looked at her sexually because her mom and I were a bit flirtatious despite the age difference, and I more saw her as extended family than a possible love interest.”, a
“That said, they were GETTING it, and it was legit hard not to listen out of curiosity as much as anything else. Eventually, they tired each other out, and I fell back asleep.”
“The next morning, I had no idea what to say to her or her boyfriend. I was searching their faces for any sign that they were looking at me for a reaction.”
“In my mind, there was no way it wasn’t on purpose. It was SO LOUD. Like, if you live in a house, you know how thin the walls are.”
“You know you can hear the TV from the living room in your room. I assumed that she knew I could hear them literally slamming the bedframe into the wall. Was it a show of dominance? An attempt to drive me out? An attempt to pull me in?”
“Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long. I was making some food in the kitchen while daughter was washing her dishes, my friend walked in the kitchen and asked me, ‘What the hell were you watching last night?’.”
“The question caught me so off guard, she could see the shock on my face, when I answered, ‘Uhhh, I wasn’t watching anything, that uhhhh, that wasn’t me’. I heard a fork drop into the sink, daughter turned and looked at both of us with a horrified expression, and was like, ‘I….. I need to go talk to my boyfriend’ and ran out of the room.”
“Turned out it was loud enough that it carried all the way across the house into my friend’s room, but she couldn’t hear the full suite of sounds. Just the rhythmic thumping and occasional shout.”
“She told me at first she thought I was watching some kind of war movie or something, but then she realized it was an extended sex scene of some sort.”
“This was pre-ubiquitous smartphone, so her brain didn’t immediately go to porn, and she knew I wasn’t a big enough degenerate to just be watching porn in her living room with everyone home, so she’d just assumed I was watching some kind of action movie way too loud, and it had a very over the top sex scene.”
“She’d been planning on telling me off for watching such a thing so late. For OBVIOUS reasons, her first thought wasn’t that her daughter was getting the absolute bottom knocked out and forgot the rest of the world existed.”
“After daughter ran out though, she started putting two and two together and I watched her expression go from shock to one of impressed amusement. She talked to daughter in private later and confirmed, it in no way was on purpose.”
“They legit were having such a good time, they just stopped thinking about how thin the walls were. Daughter was absolutely mortified, and I never brought it up or let her know exactly HOW much I could hear.”
“I say all this to ask, is it possible OP, that she’s been explicitly hearing you have sex for a while now and just assumed this was the vibe?” ~ cl2eep
OP isn’t asking for abstinence from their roommate, just a little discretion.
Is that too much to ask?