am I [F23] actually being "too much" like my boyfriend [M24] says or is he just ungrateful and rude?

my boyfriend is a very messy person but doesn't believe he is and it's slowly driving me insane.

sometimes when I clean things he will physically hold me still and say "stop with the tism" [I've never been diagnosed but show symptoms according to him] and other times he literally gets upset with me for cleaning. [I do have OCD]

when I moved in with my boyfriend, I don't think he was ever taught how to keep a clean house and always gets upset when I try and show him or teach him.

  1. he won't clean the bathrooms unless it's "just the tub" so that's my job.
  2. he leaves sponges, dish cloths, and steel wire in the sink with the dirty dishes and they always get disgustingly filled with food because plates are rarely fully scraped into the garbage.
  3. he leaves plastic bottles and cans in our bedroom and office space and rarely takes them downstairs so I have to do it or the rooms fill up. [takeout bags/boxes sometimes too]
  4. he wipes crumbs onto the carpets/floors instead of wiping them onto a plate or a bin.
  5. if he accidentally spills a sauce on our wooden desks, wooden table, or carpet he doesn't clean it up [we're renting asw] and it will solidify and becomes impossible to clean which ruins the surface of the desks and stains the carpet! [he also made our desks himself and stained them so you'd think he'd care more?]
  6. he leaves his stuff everywhere and never puts it away so the house always looks messy. clothes, random objects, everything, on the floors, desks, everywhere.
  7. cans are never rinsed out and just thrown into the bin and for the first time in my life, I had the experience of seeing maggots due to this.

today I was cleaning up his desk because it was dusty and dirty with crumbs and takeout boxes and as I'm moving his things off of it so I can spray and wipe it, he gets upset and tells me to stop touching his stuff and that "I know he hates it when I move his stuff around" even tho I place all his objects into a drawer unit right under his desk, never anywhere else 🙄 bro acts like I spread his things all over so he can never find them.

a week or so ago, our landlord scheduled a house showing that I was not aware of because my boyfriend forgot to tell me so I had to get up half asleep and quickly try to clean up the house because I like it to be clean when people come see it and he got annoyed with me once more and tried to stop me again telling me it wasn't a big deal, like idk anymore man. I grew up in a strict-ish household and my mom [she got less strict over time] taught me how to keep a clean house and I'd be mortified if she saw the state the house was in or if anyone saw it for that matter.

a few weeks before that, whenever I want to clean the kitchen I always have to spend around ~3 hours doing it because there's always a pile of dishes and every surface has crumbs, sauce, and whatever all over it. so I spent forever doing that and then the very next day it's in the exact same state it was because my boyfriend cooked and won't clean because he's already tired from cooking. I got very upset with him and the only thing he had to tell me was "that's life" and "things will always get dirty again" like omg am I actually going crazy?? because that is so disrespectful?? someone spends forever cleaning something up and the next person to use it just doesn't give a damn and thinks that's normal??

I want to just give up every day just seeing the state the house is always in. I moved to a new country to be with him, he's 24 and I'm 23 for reference and neither of us have jobs but I'm currently looking. he also has sickle cell which means he's in pain most of the time and doesn't have a lot of energy and while I do understand that, I don't understand how he can have the energy to cook or go out places or do random things but not clean up just a little.

Posted Aug 8, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

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