Roommate Upset After Being Asked to Stop Baby Voice With Boyfriend

A woman asks the Reddit community for advice following an awkward conflict with her roommate about a behavior she just can’t handle. The 24-year-old explains that she struggles with sensory issues and sometimes certain sounds are overwhelming, even when she tries her best to cope.

She shared, “I have some sensory issues around sounds and I do try to deal with it myself by going to my room and putting on headphones or something.” But since their apartment is small, she admitted that she can’t always get away when she feels overwhelmed.

The woman and her roommate have known each other for years and have lived together for more than two of those years. She says they usually communicate openly, calling it a “great roommate situation.”

The problem started with the roommate’s boyfriend, who stays over often. “Her boyfriend comes over quite frequently for about 4 days at a time, which is something we discussed before I moved in and I’m fine with,” she wrote, adding that she enjoys being around both of them.

The issue is what happens when the couple is together. She confessed, “My problem is that they do a baby voice with each other that, to be frank, really grinds my gears lol.” While she normally tries to ignore it, she said it recently became too much.

She explained that when the boyfriend stayed for more than a week, she reached “a tipping point where it was too much for me.” Wanting to be respectful, she spoke to her roommate privately and asked if she could stop using the voice while she was around.

The woman admitted that her wording wasn’t ideal. “I said (and I do regret this wording) that I found it kind of gross and that it got on my nerves,” she recalled. At the same time, she tried to soften the message, telling her roommate, “I really don’t want you to think I’m not happy for you guys because I really am.”

Her roommate didn’t take it well and later admitted that being told it was “gross” really hurt her feelings. The woman said she felt guilty for the choice of words and wondered if she should have said anything at all.

She also worried that she made her roommate uncomfortable in her own home. “She also said she felt like she has to be hypervigilant of how she acts with him around me because we’ve had a similar conversation before about other behaviours they do when he’s been over for a long period of time,” she shared.

Despite her concerns, she insisted the issue is not about disliking her roommate’s relationship. “I don’t want her to feel like I think her relationship is gross, because I don’t, I just hate that voice lol,” she wrote. She also recognizes that “it is her apartment too.”

As she weighed whether she crossed a line, she admitted her schedule already limits how often she’s even around to hear it. “I work a full time job and I’m away a lot of evenings during the week, so I’m not there to hear it a lot of the time anyway,” she said.

The woman closed her post by asking, “Should I have asked my roommate to stop doing this certain voice with her boyfriend when I’m around? Do I have the right to ask that? Please be honest with me.”

Many commenters jumped in to reassure her that she wasn’t overreacting. One wrote, “I know exactly what you’re talking about, and believe me, you’re doing her a [favor]. I’ve seen young couples do that stuff around others before and it absolutely is gross and off[-]putting, it’s not much different than too much PDA.”

That commenter continued, “It’s too intimate to be doing around other people, for sure. If she can’t see that, she has some growing up to do. She’ll cringe at it herself when she grows up a bit. NTA.”

Another person pointed out that while the concern is valid, the delivery may have been the sticking point.

They wrote, “You have every right to set boundaries in your own home, especially around something that genuinely bothers you. The tricky part was the wording calling it ‘gross’ probably made it feel personal to her, even though your intent was about the behavior, not her or her relationship.”