24-year-old drains 54-year-old roommate's soaking laundry, she ices him out for days: 'She then proceeds to call me ignorant'

JR Atkinson • Writer and Editor

Jul 10, 2026 10:00 AM EDT

Do you soak your laundry in the washing machine?

Everyone has different ways of doing things. We all grew up with different traditions and different cultural backgrounds. You really start to learn this when you live with roommates. You find out that some people keep their peanut butter in the fridge and their eggs on the counter. We all have different little quirks and habits that we picked up from our own families, and this isn't a bad thing. There is no one right way to do something, only the way you choose to do it. But there is a wrong way to deal with roommates, and the roommate in this story certainly chose to do that. You should never approach one another with hostility, even when things are going the wrong way. You should always approach with an open heart, because once things go bad, they are very hard to get back on track. The roommate relationship here might have been doomed from the start, though.

Add as a preferred
source on Google

AITAH For draining my roommates soaking laundry?
Hey Reddit, I (24M) recently just caused some distress in my current roommate (52F) sho moved in a few months ago. I had just gotten home for the day and made myself some food. My next plan was to do a load of laundry, and when I opened the washer, it was full of water and some random cotton items. They weren't clothes, so imagine neck pillows and misc items. My first instinct was that something might be wrong with the washer since I had heard it moving earlier and stop. So I set the washer to spin to test the draining ability, and it worked, so I assumed the problem was solved.

About ten minutes later, my roommate emerged from her room, and I go to ask her about it, making sure everything she put in was safe for the washer. She explained to me that she likes to soak everything she washes for a few hours, which was a foreign concept to me and had never been a thing anyone I grew up or lived with had done. I apologized to her once she explained this fact, but she continued to show that she was very upset. I began offering some of my detergent and even offered to do my laundry another day as an extension of good faith, continuing to apologize for the misunderstanding.
via Unsplash+ (Curated Lifestyle)

A woman loads laundry into a washing machine
^{Subjects are models.}
It's never a good idea to call someone out for no good reason. If you're just looking to pick a fight, then you need to reevaluate your life. You shouldn't go around searching out conflict. You should approach it reasonably, and expect that everyone else will approach it reasonably too. But when you find yourself in a fight with someone, you better make sure you're on the right side of history. You would hate to have to walk back all of your critiques.
via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

A pair of roommates have an argument on the couch
^{Subjects are models.}
She sits there staring at me, not saying anything, and eventually I confront her and ask her to just tell me something instead of just staring at me disaprovingly. She then proceeds to call me ignorant and says that I dont think about anything. I didn't particularly like being called ignorant and tried to explain to her that I'm not used to people soaking their laundry for hours and assumed the washer had just timed out. Yes, technically if I thought about the situation more, I could've made that conclusion, but I thought it was a minor enough mistake that she would understand. I even offered some of my own detergent to start the cycle over.

Anyways we had a discussion that got a little heated because I felt insulted by the ways she was talking to me and the final straw that made me raise my voice with her was when she was about to head out for a walk and she ended up saying that she wouldn't do something like that because she thinks about things and shes not stupid. And after this I got more upset and asked her to clarify if she was calling me stupid and at this point I couldn't help but remind her of the fact that I helped her get out of an assisted living situation and did a nice thing for her only to be called stupid for making a simple roommate mistake. She said "People say things for a reason"
via Unsplash+ (A. C.)

A woman loads laundry in a front-loading washing machine
^{Subjects are models.}
The roommate in this story was not acting reasonably. Something unavoidable happened, and instead of meeting it with understanding, she chose to lash out at the people closest to her. This is no way to treat the people that you live with. The roommate relationship is not an easy one, and it can quickly disintegrate if you start searching for conflict like this. This problem should have been easily solved, but it wasn't. So the roommate took to the internet to air out their grievances and ask for a little guidance on the situation.
And then after calming down a bit I tried to start a dialogue with her about making sure the other roommates know when shes doing 3 hour laundry soaks and she acted like I was talking down to her like a child. Meanwhile, the entire time, she's highlighting the fact that she's twice my age and has twice the experience.

So what's the consensus? Was i too impulsive or ignorant? Maybe I was but even if I was did it warrant the way she reacted to a first time situation?
-u/Flaminghotskittles