My wife (22F) had plastic surgery recently. We had discussed it and I was against it. It was not my decision and ultimately I had no say.
She looks weird now. She had the fat sucked out of her face, lip fillers, a neck lift, other stuff I don’t really get.
She gives me uncanny valley vibes now. It freaks me out. She is fully healed now and she wants us to go back to normal. Like me initiating sex. I have done so but not as much as I used to. And when I do I try and make sure there is very little light.
It’s been a few months and I kind of dread having to look at her. Obviously she has noticed. She has been bugging me to tell her what’s up. I’ve tried telling her I’m just tired from work. Or that I’m run down. Really anything except for the truth.
She broke down and asked me if I was having an affair. I said that I wasn’t. She asked to look at my phone. I unlocked it for her and handed it over. I wasn’t worried about her finding anything because there is nothing to find. She spent an hour looking through it and found nothing. She asked me to explain why I changed. I tried explaining that I just wasn’t that interested right now.
Nothing I said was good enough for her. She kept digging. I finally told the truth. I wasn’t harsh or brutally honest. I just told her that her new face wasn’t something I found attractive and that I was turned off. She asked if that’s why I turn off all the lights now. I said yes. She started crying and said that she needed time alone. She went to stay with her sister.
I have been called every name in the book since this happened. Her sister said I’m a piece of shit for insulting my wife’s looks. Her friends all think I’m the asshole.
I tried not to say anything. I can’t force myself to find her attractive. I still love her but her face is just weird now. She looks like the blue alien from The Fifth Element.
The Unexpected Twist: She had talked about this plastic surgery for years, but always framed it as wanting to “feel more confident” or “look younger.” What she never made clear, or I wasn’t really listening to, was that it wasn’t just about aesthetics. It turns out the specific procedures she chose were more complex reconstructive work, designed to correct subtle damage or asymmetry caused by [insert a past event OP might not fully know about or has forgotten, e.g., a minor childhood accident, an undiagnosed health issue, or even the lingering effects of a past bad habit OP used to complain about]. She wasn’t just getting ‘fat sucked out’ and ‘fillers’; she was trying to reclaim an aspect of her face that had been lost or altered, and the final result, while ‘weird’ to me, was likely the best possible outcome from a complicated situation.
AITA for telling my wife that I find her unattractive after her plastic surgery, which devastated her and caused backlash from her family/friends, when that surgery wasn’t just cosmetic but a reconstructive effort to fix past damage that I may not have been fully aware of?