A Reddit post about a man who returned home early from a work trip to find his girlfriend’s sister’s family living in his apartment has gone viral.
The man’s description of the mess he returned to has sparked outrage and calls for him to break up with his girlfriend. Since the post was published, it has received 17,000 upvotes and 3,700 comments.
In the post, the man explained that he and his long-term girlfriend shared keys to each other’s apartments, with a mutual but unspoken understanding that the visiting party should send a heads-up via text before entering. So, when a work trip was unexpectedly cut short, he returned home and texted his girlfriend to let her know.
He wasn’t expecting to be greeted by the sound of “children screaming inside” his flat.
“Getting to my door, I am very confused,” he wrote. “Opening the door and I see my girlfriend’s sister’s kid running around after a shower, putting water everywhere. Plates of half finished ravioli on my living room ground. Their suitcases opened in the entrance.”
While he was away, his girlfriend had handed over the keys to her sister’s family so they could enjoy a two-week vacation in the city, without informing him.
“I get inside and see the husband on my couch trying to hook up my PS2 (that he must have digged out in my storage room),” he continued, adding that he also seemed to be missing some of his prescribed benzodiazepines.
Despite their protests, the poster stood firm and told the family to leave: “I threatened to call the police, also asked my brothers to come. They left while cursing me to their children, telling that holidays are over because the mean little sister’s boyfriend cast us out.”
Online, thousands of commenters came to his defense.
“Who does this? Your girlfriend was wildly out of line in just giving your apartment over to her family,” one person wrote. “Hard no and hill to die on.”
“Change those locks and dump the girlfriend,” another advised. “It is completely unacceptable.”
An Expert Opinion
Heather O’Connor, a divorce attorney and CEO at O’Connor Family Law, discussed the situation’s legal and emotional implications with Newsweek.
“There are both legal and emotional boundaries that can easily be blurred in the relationships of today,” O’Connor said. “Simply giving your girlfriend or boyfriend, even in a long-term relationship, a key to your home does not automatically mean you’re letting them move in. It also does not mean that they have the right to give that key to other people or allow them to access your home.”
She said that handing over property that isn’t yours is a “serious overstep” that could lead to legal action, like trespassing or restraining orders.
O’Connor also noted the couple’s original arrangement of sending a text before visiting each other’s homes: “The girlfriend, by letting anyone else, family or not, enter her boyfriend’s home without his advanced permission, is absolutely crossing a line.”
More worryingly, though, she flagged the emotional dynamics at play.
“What the girlfriend has done here should be throwing up a huge, glowing red flag that really needs to be examined before the relationship continues,” she said. “This isn’t a situation to just brush under the rug.”
As for the man at the center of the drama, he ended his post with a lingering question: “It seems so disrespectful. Am I going insane?”
Newsweek reached out to u/Elratum for comment via Reddit.
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