Dating is already a waking nightmare, but adding a major medical crisis to the mix really shows you exactly who a person is. When we talk about supporting a partner through sickness and health, we usually picture holding hands in hospital rooms and stepping up to handle the household chores. We absolutely do not picture a grown man demanding his sick girlfriend pack his little lunchboxes. One woman recently took to Reddit to share the mind boggling behavior of her younger boyfriend, and the absolute sheer audacity of this man will make you want to scream.
The Original Poster is a thirty one year old woman who is currently fighting the absolute battle of her life. She was diagnosed with a rare cancer called Synovial sarcoma. Since the beginning of January, she has been undergoing an incredibly intense regimen of Ifosfamide chemotherapy. This is not a quick afternoon appointment. She spends eight agonizing hours in the cancer center, five days a week, every three weeks.
The medical treatments are severely taxing on her body. She deals with crushing nausea, extreme fatigue, and a host of other debilitating side effects. She is fighting for her survival and giving every ounce of her physical energy just to make it through the week. Enter her twenty four year old boyfriend, a guy who somehow looked at his seriously ill partner and decided he was the one who desperately needed some coddling.
The night before she was scheduled to start her next brutal chemotherapy cycle, this man approached her with a deeply unhinged request. He asked his girlfriend to meal prep his food for him. He did not ask her to order a pizza or toss a frozen dinner in the microwave. He explicitly wanted her to prepare his entire week’s worth of meals from scratch right after she spent ten hours at the hospital.
Because she knows her boyfriend is highly sensitive and prone to starting arguments, she tried to handle the ridiculous demand delicately. She hesitated and gently suggested that she might be able to do it in a week and a half, once she was fully recovered from her upcoming chemo cycle. Most normal people with a shred of empathy would instantly apologize and withdraw the request.
This guy is not most people. He was incredibly insistent. He kept pushing the issue and actually asked her to just try to do it anyway. He completely refused to take no for an answer. The Original Poster understandably started getting agitated. She admitted that during this terrifying chapter of her life, she really just wants to feel taken care of and supported, not ordered around to do heavy household chores for a fully capable adult.
Let us take a quick look at this guy’s daily schedule. He works an early morning shift and gets off work in the early afternoon. He literally has the entire second half of his day completely free. He is not working eighty hour weeks or saving lives in an emergency room. He has plenty of time to go to the grocery store, chop up some vegetables, and cook his own chicken and rice.
Despite fighting a rare cancer, the Original Poster actually still does plenty of things for him. When he comes over, she offers him whatever food she has, makes him sandwiches, and even gives him massages while they sit on the couch. She makes a massive effort to ensure their relationship does not revolve entirely around her sickness. She just drew a very reasonable boundary about standing in a kitchen for hours right after chemotherapy.
The boyfriend’s reaction to this boundary is straight out of the toxic dating playbook. He completely blew up at her. He decided to weaponize therapy terminology by declaring that acts of service is his love language. He then had the absolute nerve to call their relationship one sided and sent her a barrage of angry text messages. He picked a massive fight with a cancer patient over Tupperware containers.
The irony is that his own contributions are shockingly minimal. He takes out her trash when she specifically asks him to and rubs her shoulders occasionally. That is the bare minimum of human decency, yet he expects a gold star. The internet universally crowned him the absolute a**hole and begged the Original Poster to drop the dead weight. She needs all her strength to fight her illness, and she certainly does not need a twenty four year old toddler making her life infinitely harder.