The latest drama on Reddit’s Am I The Arsehole [AITA] thread sounds like it could have been a script caveat in Jason Reitman’s film Juno. Essentially, a 34-year-old woman wants to know whether she was in the wrong for asking her 37-year-old husband to stop crossing boundaries with their surrogate. And some of his behaviour is seriously problematic.
‘Me and my husband Hunter suffered from fertility problems,’ the original poster [OP] wrote on the site. ‘We recently decided to get a surrogate who’s a friend of a friend…[Our] surrogate is a respectful, kind woman who’s been keeping her part of the contract in tact, but it’s Hunter who’s starting to act strange.’ Uh oh.
‘I’ve noticed that he’s been focusing all his attention on our surrogate,’ she continued. ‘Skipping work, to visit her or get her things she didn’t ask for, chat[ting] with her all the time on social media and constantly offering to do things for her like drive her places, invite her out and repair stuff for her.
‘She complained to me about this and even told me about things he’d been doing that I didn’t know about, like bringing her gifts’ the woman said. ‘I tried to speak to him about what it looks like but he’s said he’s doing it for his son and not her.
‘I asked him to tone it down and respect the woman’s space,’ the 'OP' (original poster) added. ‘He got mad at me and accused me of being jealous of the woman who’s carrying my own child and said it makes me look bad. I said it was the surrogate who complained, and he said it wasn’t true.
‘Yesterday, our surrogate called me saying that Hunter came over and told her guests to leave. I asked “why” and she said that he wanted to show her the 9k car he bought for her. I was shocked, she said she declined the car and asked him to leave but he started arguing with her about using public transportation and risking our baby’s wellbeing.’
The OP then explained how this was the final straw and she told her husband he’d been ‘nothing but overstepping, disrespectful and inappropriate’ — which is totally true. ‘I told him to stop disrespecting the woman and stop using the baby as an excuse to stomp all over her boundaries,’ she added. ‘He ranted about how he was just trying to make this work…He even accused me of not loving our son as much as he does.’ The audacity.
'I told him to stop disrespecting the woman and stop using the baby as an excuse to stomp all over her boundaries'
After this outrageous exchange, the OP is now worrying that she’s been too hard on her husband. ‘He might’ve been oblivious,’ she tells the forum. But, as many Reddit users pointed out, this woman is absolutely not the arsehole here.
Her husband is, clearly, doing one of two things: either he is infatuated with their surrogate, and it is letting his crush lead him to stomp all over her boundaries, or, he thinks he has the right to police what a pregnant woman does with her body — which is really not okay.
Just because this woman is carrying his child, doesn’t give him the right to turn up at her home, bombard her with unwanted gifts, harass her on social media or tell her how she can or can’t travel.
While it bears considering that Hunter may be particularly concerned about the wellbeing of his child due to his problems with infertility, it absolutely doesn’t mean he can disregard his surrogate’s wellbeing and make her feel uncomfortable in her own home.
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