Sick Wife Asks Husband for Birthday House Cleaning, Husband Foolishly Does It Himself
A poster turned to Reddit's AITA board to lament her husband's poorly executed birthday present to her.
She asked for a professional house cleaning, but got a half-hearted attempt from her husband himself.
Commenters overwhelmingly sided with the poster, saying the husband should have done more.
Here at Best Products, we're all about giving helpful gifting advice. Need a Mother's Day gift for a mom who's hard to shop for? We've got some advice. Don't know how much to spend on a baby shower gift? We've got some advice.
And we've got some extra-important gifting advice to give right here, right at the start of this story: If somebody tells you exactly what they want as a birthday gift, get them that. Don't overthink it, don't try and "one-up" it. They're telling you what they want, don't get swept up in, "Well, I have a better idea."
That's a piece of advice a husband in a since-deleted Reddit AITA (short for "Am I the A**hole") post should have followed. Though the original post is gone, PopCrush provided all the details about the poster, their husband, and his poorly thought out birthday present for her.
The original poster stated that, having been sick in bed for several days, she recognized that household chores had fallen by the wayside. With her birthday coming up, she reportedly told her husband she wanted the house cleaned. So, the husband in question took it upon himself to undertake the house cleaning, in lieu of purchasing a birthday present.
"Here's my problem: having the whole house cleaned would be a great gift, but I specified professionally," the poster reportedly wrote. "My husband is great at a lot of things, but he's not very detail-oriented, and he tends to miss very obvious things."
And to make matters worse, when it comes to cleaning, he's apparently just ... just plain awful at it.
"I feel like on the face this is thoughtful ... but while he's great at coming up with ideas, he's really bad at executing them. If he's not going to just hire a professional, I would rather have a traditional gift," the Reddit user reportedly posted, per PopCrush. "I put a lot of thought and care into his and our children's birthdays, and I would like one day where this is reciprocated."
The commenters obviously sided with the original poster. "NTA," one noted, adding, "...commenting that a professional house clean would be a great gift for you but then having your husband do a half job are two totally different things. If he wanted his car detailed for his birthday gift and you hosed it down with the garden hose instead, should [he] be grateful?"
Another commenter added, "But even then, why does he think it’s okay to 'give her' the “gift” of him helping to clean the house? Does he not live there? Why is him cleaning such a special thing? This is not okay, and it’s super tacky to do that to someone you care about on their birthday."
Now, at the risk of getting even more angry emails than usual, it should be said that the husband's line of thinking, in a vacuum, makes some degree of sense. At least insofar as it's easy to see how one would think, "You know what? It's probably even better if I put in the hard work myself, rather than just throw money at it with no real effort on my part."
But my guy, you live there. You should have been doing your share of this work anyway. And even if you were somehow an A+ cleaner, which you're apparently not, she asked for a professional cleaning. So just get her the thing she asked for. It's simple.
So simple, in fact, that nobody could even question if the poster of this "Am I the A**hole" post had even remotely been an "a**hole." The husband was so clearly in the wrong, and the poster's complaint leaving so little room for debate, that the original post was removed from Reddit on the grounds that, "There is no interpersonal conflict here for our community to make a judgment about."
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