The furious red face of my lactose-intolerant roommate, R, still burned in my mind. His forty-minute bathroom ordeal, followed by his explosive admission of “sometimes” stealing my food, felt like a twisted vindication. My other roommate, a silent ally, found it hilarious, but the few buddies who thought I was an asshole for weaponizing dairy lingered in my thoughts. As R plotted my eviction, blissfully unaware of our own escape plan, I remained steadfast: I was not the asshole. He had pushed me to this point with his lies and thievery, and I had simply provided proof. But the question of whether the “dairy trap” had been a step too far still lingered, a stubborn stain like the imaginary one on his rug.
The apartment was a battlefield of silent warfare. R cooked elaborate, heavily-guarded meals, glaring if I even glanced in his direction. My roommate and I communicated in hushed tones, our plans for a new apartment gaining momentum with every frosty interaction. I felt a grim satisfaction at having exposed R, but the constant tension, the lingering sense of being the “bad guy” in some eyes, was exhausting.
One afternoon, I was at a coffee shop, escaping the apartment’s suffocating atmosphere. I overheard a conversation at the next table. Two guys were talking, and one of them, with a voice that was eerily familiar, was complaining loudly.
“My roommate’s a psycho, man,” he grumbled. “Totally messed with my milk, knew I was lactose intolerant. Got me sick as a dog.”
It was R. I froze, trying to make myself invisible.
“Dude, that’s messed up,” his friend replied. “But why would he even do that? What’s his deal?”
R sighed dramatically. “Honestly, I think he’s just paranoid. Always accusing me of stealing his food. It’s ridiculous. I buy plenty of my own stuff.”
His friend snorted. “Yeah, but you do raid the fridge sometimes, don’t you? Be honest.”
R hesitated. “Okay, fine, sometimes. But it’s not like I’m doing it maliciously. It’s just… sometimes I forget to buy something, or I’m really hungry, or I just don’t feel like making anything. It’s just a little bit, you know? Like, a splash of milk for my shake, a bite of a leftover. What’s the big deal? We’re roommates.”
His friend chuckled. “A splash of milk that gives you diarrhea for 40 minutes? That’s a pretty big deal, man. And if you’re taking food all the time, even small amounts, it adds up. It’s not just about the food, it’s about trust.”
R scoffed. “Trust? It’s just food! And he knows I’m lactose intolerant! Why would he pull a stunt like that if he wasn’t trying to be a total asshole? Like, why would he want me to get sick?”
His friend’s voice lowered, becoming more serious. “You know, my younger sister used to do something similar. She’d constantly take my stuff without asking, even when she had her own. Drove me nuts. And my parents, they’d always say, ‘Oh, it’s just borrowing, it’s normal among siblings.’ Never made her actually replace anything. She just never learned. And it wasn’t about the stuff for her, it was about proving she could get away with it, that she was ‘owed’ it. It was like a game for her, and she’d get really upset when I finally put my foot down.”
R was silent for a moment, then let out a small, almost imperceptible sigh. “My older brother… he used to do that,” he said, his voice barely audible. “He was the oldest, and he always took whatever he wanted from my stuff. My toys, my snacks, even my pocket money. And if I complained, my parents would always tell me, ‘He’s your older brother, he’s just ‘borrowing.’ You should share. Don’t be selfish.’ They always sided with him. And if I tried to hide my stuff, he’d find it and make a huge deal about how I was ‘selfish’ and ‘untrusting.’ So I just… I learned to live with it. And sometimes, I’d even take his stuff, just to feel like I had some control, some power.”
He paused, a strange, choked sound in his voice. “When I see your milk, or your leftovers… it’s like… it’s like he’s there. My brother. And I just… I take it. It’s not about being hungry. It’s about… it’s about proving I can, without anyone stopping me. And when you confronted me, when you got mad, it was like being a kid again, being told I was ‘selfish’ for wanting my own stuff. And when you switched the milk… I just reacted. It was like he was playing a trick on me again, trying to control me, just like my brother always did.”
He buried his face in his hands. “I just wanted to make a shake, man. I just wanted a simple shake, and I got sick. And now… now I realize it wasn’t about the milk, was it? It was about everything else.”
I sat there, stunned. The “stealing,” the “denial,” the “paranoia,” the “stinginess” about his own food – it wasn’t just about R being a bad roommate. It was a deeply ingrained, almost ritualistic behavior, a lifelong coping mechanism stemming from unacknowledged, unaddressed childhood trauma. He wasn’t just a thief; he was a person replaying a subconscious battle for control and ownership, a desperate echo of a childhood where his personal boundaries were constantly violated and his sense of autonomy stripped away. My “dairy trap,” while effective, had inadvertently triggered a profound, unhealed wound. The AITA question, once a clear binary, dissolved into a complex, painful understanding of how deeply individual trauma and unresolved childhood dynamics could manifest in seemingly mundane, yet devastating, adult conflicts.