29 People Share The Strangest Thing They Learned About Their Partner After Moving In
Moving in together is a big relationship milestone because you finally get to learn how the person you love loads a dishwasher incorrectly. Before that, you’re mostly seeing each other under controlled conditions.
When you share an address, you have questions that never occurred to you during the dating process. Mostly, “Have you always done this?”
I’m married, and we both work from home, so there’s very little opportunity to keep a weird habit private. Eventually, someone is gonna witness it and need an explanation. These people moved in with their partners and discovered some unusual routines. Some are harmless. Others would have me looking for a second bedroom.
1. “Too bad we don’t have any lettuce.”
“We were fixing to watch a movie, and he wanted popcorn. He said, ‘Too bad we don’t have any lettuce.’ I asked if he wanted a salad, and he said, ‘No, I want popcorn and lettuce.’ He said he never said anything at the movie theater because he always knew they never had lettuce. The man eats bites of lettuce and popcorn together. His whole family does.”
2. A very specific sleep-related injury.
“In the middle of the night, I will wake up to him having both of his arms straight in the air like a damn zombie. If I lay too close to him when he does this, I get a surprise mammogram when he inevitably drops his arms down.”
3. The contact lens graveyard.
“She threw all of her daily contacts behind her headboard, and I don’t think she ever intended to clean them up because there were like 300 of them back there.”
“300 tiny crispy frisbees behind your headboard, excellent.”
4. Bedtime tortellini. Dry.
“He will occasionally (usually when I’m not around to be appalled) eat dry tortellini straight out of the bag when he’s reading in bed. Dry. Tortellini.”
“OK, I’ve read enough. Good luck and Godspeed.”
5. The first night was concerning. The second required holy water.
“My ex slept with his eyes slightly open. The first night, I thought he had died. The second night, I almost performed an exorcism.”
“This is exactly what holy water is for.”
6. Apparently, Oreo soup is on the menu.
“She eats Oreos by taking a tall glass and filling it about three-quarters full of the cookies, and then she fills the glass with milk. She then waits about 5–10 minutes, stirs it all into a slurry, and eats it like a soup.”
7. There’s a lot happening in these dreams.
“I always thought that when movies or TV shows feature someone talking in their sleep, and they just spout random, silly nonsense, that it was mostly for comedic effect and wasn’t really a reflection of real life. Nope. My partner talks in his sleep, and it’s always just absolutely random, silly nonsense. The most recent one was, in a tone of dismay, ‘There’s ice cream all over the stairs…’ followed by a drawn-out ‘broooooooo.’
He also just periodically giggles in his sleep, which, frankly, is one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen from another human.”
“I keep a note in my phone for these quotes and plan to make him a little coffee table book with the conversations we’ve had in his sleep written out like poetry. The note goes back four years, and I think it’s time for volume 1.”
“My ex-husband would say the most random s*** in his sleep, too. One time, he was groaning and moaning, but not in a sexy way, so I asked him what was wrong. He said, in the most miserable tone, ‘The man! He’s putting the farts in the bag.’”
8. The cleaning service had a surprise cancellation.
“That he only cleaned the apartment before I came over. He never cleaned. This man was living in absolute filth.”
“My friend found out after she married her now ex-husband that his mom had been cleaning their apartment. Once they married, the mom stopped, which is how she found out.”
9. Corn on the cob, banana style.
“She eats corn on the cob vertically. She holds it as one would hold a banana, eats a layer around the cob, and moves down.”
10. Every household has its emergency plan.
“She has to have a kettle of water on the stove at all times. She rarely uses the kettle. It is in case the power goes out and the well pump stops. We have city water service.”
— inkseep1
11. Meet the snot shirt.
“The snot shirt. When he gets any kind of respiratory sickness, he takes a shirt out, puts it on his nightstand, and blows his nose in it during the night. He says it’s cheaper and softer than tissues.”
12. A bathroom appointment with no confirmed arrival time.
“He gets a weird feeling in his tummy and then goes to sit on the toilet for an hour until he has a bowel movement. I, apparently, wait until I get the cue to go to the bathroom before actually attempting, as I thought was normal.
He quite literally made fun of me yesterday for kicking him off the toilet. ‘You made me get up to only take 30 seconds??’ Dude, you’ve been in there for 45 minutes, and clearly, nothing was happening if you could just let me in like that.”
“He has a hot date with some hemorrhoids in his future.”
13. Sleeping like someone awaiting an open-casket viewing.
“He sleeps like a vampire: sleeping on his back, with his arms straight by his sides or folded on his chest. Every. Single. Night. Some nights, he doesn’t even change his position at all. I was seriously concerned during the first couple of nights we slept in the same bed.”
“Oh, my god, mine, too. He sleeps propped up on four pillows. He pulls the covers up to his chin and then puts his arms outside of the blankets, like someone who just died in a hospital bed. He also doesn’t like his feet being covered by the blanket. He drives with Google Maps oriented north. I think he is a psychopath.”
“This is me. I barely move in my sleep. I sleep on my back with my hands folded on my lap. I can normally get up in the mornings and barely have to make the bed because nothing moves. My boyfriend, however, is fighting demons in his sleep and rolls all around and splays out and kicks and twitches. He will throw everything off the bed.”
14. The gas station is open 24 hours.
“He farts nonstop. It just won’t f***ing stop. I call him my little gas station.”
“I feel your pain. Mine likes to walk through the house, then stop dead-stride, turn around, stare into my eyes, no matter where I am in the house, and cut the loudest and longest farts, all while keeping that stare-down. I’m wondering if he’s trying to challenge me.”
15. His ideal bedroom is experiencing a severe weather event.
“My boyfriend essentially needs blizzard conditions to sleep: ceiling fan, side fan, completely naked. Sometimes, he puts an ice pack under his pillow, and he puts blizzard sound effects on his earphones to drop off. If I’m there, he also constantly hugs, squeezes, or wraps himself around me.
We only lived together for a week at a time before. As I need basically the opposite conditions (warm, layered pajamas, untouched, silence), we’re not compatible with sharing a sleeping space. So in a couple of months, we’re getting a two-bedroom place together so we both get to sleep and not want to murder each other.”
“I think a lot of marriages would benefit from different sleeping spaces.
My husband and I at least have two different blankets on the bed. Now, we don’t have to pull to get our share.
When we get a hotel room, they’re usually two queens, and we may first cuddle together like at home but ultimately sleep separately.”
16. A silverware drawer with absolutely no rules.
“He wanted to put all the cutlery just straight into a drawer without any divides between knives, forks, and spoons. Just… all in there in a mess.”
17. The midnight snack leaves a trail.
“He wakes up every night to find something to eat from the fridge while half asleep and drops food all the way from the fridge back to bed. Sometimes, he leaves cutlery in the fridge.”
18. The shower ends when evaporation says it does.
“Doesn’t dry using a towel and instead naturally air dries.”
“I had an ex like this. She would wait until the last minute to shower and get ready but refused to use a towel to speed up the process. She’d slather herself in baby oil while still wet and wait for both of them to air dry before even starting her hair or makeup.”
19. Morning coffee comes with an unexpected seating arrangement.
“She drinks coffee while pooping. There’s something so gross about that to me: consuming something while also going to the toilet. It gives me shivers.”
— huurhuis
20. Every cupboard gets to stay open.
“That it’s apparently totally normal to leave EVERY CUPBOARD OPEN. I love her more than life, but man, is it annoying.”
— Eliyrian
21. A private concert, performed entirely asleep.
“She doesn’t talk in her sleep, but she hums. Sometimes, I can make out the tune. Last night, it was ‘Pink Pony Club.’”
22. The final sip belongs to nobody.
“How every single cup of coffee is left 1/4 full around the apartment.”
“My wife leaves exactly one (1) swig in every cup.”
23. The alarms wake up everybody except their owner.
“He set tons of alarms, but none actually wake him up.”
24. Checking the oven has become a full-time job.
“While I’m cooking, he insists on opening the goddamn oven MULTIPLE TIMES to check if it’s ready. It makes me homicidal.”
25. Towels apparently come with folding instructions.
“Evidently, there is a right way and a wrong way to fold towels.”
— MrRGG
26. The can opener collection keeps returning to the drawer.
“So, when my husband and I moved in together, after various roommates and housing jumps, we ended up with a collection of can openers, but only one was any good, as it happens. I do a lot of can-heavy cooking, so I’d usually end up pulling two or three openers out, trying them till I found the one that could do all the work I needed. I’d put the extras aside, intending to ask him his thoughts on how to handle it. They still can be used, so I didn’t want to toss them out, but it’s too much work to use them for multiple cans at once. But I always forget, and he would clean the dishes and end up putting those away.”
27. Socks have become part of the decor.
“Socks. All over the place.”
28. There are frequent overnight bathroom trips.
“The number of times she gets up in the night to pee.”
29. Sometimes, the biggest surprise is a peaceful relationship.
“How unbelievably, and almost uniquely, normal she is. She has no drama. No family issues. No trauma-induced fetishes. She likes Superman and loves people for who they are. She’s mild-mannered and kind. Loves animals. We’ve never raised our voices to one another in nine years together.
Coming from 30 years of chaotic relationships, it’s still a little unsettling to me sometimes. We’ve been married seven years now, and I still wait for the bad stuff to pop up, but there may just not be any. She’s the definition of a breath of fresh air. Every day.”
— lajaunie
“Dude, this is my girlfriend. I used to feel like there was a lack of general life enthusiasm about her, but I couldn’t describe it. Only positive things. She gets excited; she has interesting things to say.
But I always felt like something was missing in our relationship. I mentioned that to my psychologist friend. She said, ‘Did you say your ex was super judgmental and over-sensitive?’ I said yeah. She said I probably see drama as ‘excitement,’ and that’s why this good relationship seems lacking.
That totally changed my perspective. It’s a mild case of ‘this person always chooses abusive partners.’ It’s because they find that the lack of drama/abuse is uncaptivating.”
— DigNitty