AITA for faking sleeping all night to see if my wife is lying?

A Reddit user shares a tense situation with their wife, who has been complaining about their cats disrupting her sleep and demanding they be removed. After noticing inconsistencies in her claims.

The user stayed awake all night to monitor the situation and discovered she was lying. Confronting her led to accusations of being obsessive and treating her like a child. Read the full story below…

‘ AITA for faking sleeping all night to see if my wife is lying?’

The past couple of months, my wife has been complaining about our cats. She’s been claiming that the cats wake her up constantly and that she’s frustrated every night that she “has to get up and open the door for the cats” or “the cats keep making noises” or “the cats keep jumping on her.”

It got to the point where she started saying she wants me to get rid of them. I told her I’ve never seen or heard any of this, but she claims I sleep through it all. She kept telling me she was getting less and less sleep and kept acting aggressive, blaming lack of sleep from the cats, and that if I didn’t get rid of them, she’d leave me.

I legitimately started considering giving the cats to my sister, until I noticed something. One morning she claimed she had gotten up multiple times throughout the night to help the cats. She listed a bunch of times.

I thought it was weird, because I had been up until 4am, and she claimed that she “got up at 1am to open the door for them, and a few times around 3am because they were meowing and jumping on her.” I was in the bedroom the entire time while she slept, and I know none of that happened. Things weren’t adding up, so I decided to run a test.

I waited until she said she was going to bed, then I let the cats out of our bedroom, lowered my phone brightness, and faked going to sleep. I just laid there in bed for the entire night, bored, but I definately did not fall asleep. I made sure to make timestamps every 30 minutes on my phone through Discord just to be sure.

I marked down every noise my cats made. One cat had jumped down from something and made a little sound at 3:18am, and one ate food relatively quietly by the bedroom door at 4:57am. Other than that, nothing happened.

Sure enough, my wife slept from 11pm until 9am, and that morning she claimed she had woken up “at least 7 times” to open doors and from cat noises and cats jumping on her. At this point I was pissed because she was clearly lying to me. I was exhausted and fed up with the lies, so I just bluntly called her out on it.

I told her, “That’s funny. I stayed up all night to monitor the cats, and they weren’t even in the room at all last night. I have timestamps and everything. So you’ve been ***lying*** to me and trying to convince me to get rid of my cats? Why?” She just sat there quitly shaking and looking pissed, then got up and left without answering.

She came back hours later and ignored me whenever I talked, and when I asked her how **I’m** the bad-guy in this situation, **she finally said that I was treating her like a child by lying about sleeping and staying up all night just to see if she was lying or not**

and that making timestamps and everything as if I was an investigator was “going too far” and makes me an obsessive a**hole. I did it because she was threatening to make me get rid of my cats or she’d leave me, and her claims didn’t add up. So, am I an “obsessive a**hole?”.

Here’s the comments of Reddit users:

KrymsinTyde −  NTA. That was g**lighting and m**ipulative, and if she had issues with your cats she should have said so directly

Samwise3214 −  NTA but you’ve kinda called her bluff about her leaving you now you’ve removed the cats excuse from the equation.. Wishing you all the best

Noodles_R −  NTA in my opinion – you had to test her. She’s trying to get you to get rid of your pets, and essentially blackmailing your relationship over it. What’s your next move?

Leopard-Recent −  NTA, but I can’t help but wonder if your wife has some type of sleep disorder? I suffer from insomnia and fall asleep for just a few minutes at a time some nights and have very vivid, realistic dreams. When I get up in the morning, I struggle sometimes to figure out what was real and what was just a dream.

APotatoPancake −  NTA. Your wife is g**lighting you. You are not an obsessives a**hole she is.

UhOhSleepyThrowaway −  **Update for those who see it:**. Well she’s gone for now. By that, I mean I kicked her out of the house. Why? Because she’s been in the bedroom for hours now, watching youtube, refusing to talk to me about what’s happened. A few minutes ago, one of the cats started meowing and scratching to get into the room.

Within seconds of him doing that, she ran over to the door and kicked it really hard and screamed “This is all your fault. F**k off.” It scared the s**t out of the cat and he hid under the couch. I opened the door and asked her what her deal was, that it could have hurt the cat, and she said “Good. F**k the cat.”

So I told her to get out of the house and go find somewhere to stay for a while. She tried to cry her way out of the situation, but I told her I had enough. I’m done. She had every opportunity to talk to me, and now she’s screaming at the cats and kicking doors and scaring them. I tried to listen and offered help, but she wanted none of it. Too late.

As she was leaving I told her she can call me when she’s calmed down and willing to talk. I’m just so drained at this point. I tried. I gave her a chance to talk before all of this, and she insisted there was nothing to talk about. I may not have handled it the most mature/healthy way, sure, but I tried.

Maybe this can be fixed, maybe not. I had hope a few hours ago, now I just…whatever.. I’m so sorry. I think I’m done replying for now. Just so much going on. So much to think about. Too many trollish comments and messages, too many people coming up with c**spiracy theories, too many people who can’t read or bother to check my comments. It’s all so tiresome.. Life is fun, though.

Prechrchet −  NTA: your wife was making claims that did not match the known facts, and you did you needed to do to get to the truth. I find it interesting that she didn’t try to argue that you made a mistake, or that you really hadn’t been up all night. That tells me that she knows she is full of it.
Get a lawyer, because you are about to need one.

hdmx539 −  NTA. But, unlike some other redditors, I’m not going to say get rid of the wife. My first thought here was whether your wife might have a problem sleeping and staying asleep. I know you said that she slept all night, but what looks like sleep may not be it.

For the longest time I thought it was my cats that were waking me up at night. However, once the last of them had passed over the rainbow bridge and I was still having this issue I knew it was something different. I *thought* I was sleeping all night, however, I actually wasn’t. I tried all sorts of sleep tests, etc.

I figured out what was my issue (my mattress was so old and with the arthritis I’ve developed I kept waking up from the pain without realizing I was waking up.) Next time ask your wife if you can observe her *sleeping*. See if she has sleep apnea, or some other sleeping problem that could possibly be disturbing her sleep.

Sometimes small almost imperceptible gasps could be her breathing has stopped during her sleep and that can disturb the sleep cycle. See about getting a sleep study done to rule out any problems or issues. Yeah, I know she says she physically gets up to let the cats our or something, but that may be some sort of sleep/dream/barely awake state.

I’ve had moments where I felt like someone was staring at me. It felt very real but obviously wasn’t. Also, this whole “sneaking around” to prove one’s wife is lying seems to be really prevalent. I don’t understand why spouses just can’t be honest and say, “Fine. I’ll stay up to see what’s going on” rather than sneaking around like this.

It feels like a lie and I’ve seen this before many times on this sub. Still think NTA, but actions like this just reek of dishonesty. That’s why your wife is responding the way she is, because this really feels really dishonest and like you’ve tricked her.

Instead of talking through what the problem might be you tricked her. She’s lost some trust in you. Hell, I would too. My husband and I don’t do things like this. We believe each other and then investigate to see what’s really going on.

danigirl3694 −  NTA there’s no reason I can see why she feels the need to lie about your cats being trouble when they’re doing nothing wrong.
Unless she’s looking for an excuse to leave you but wants you to be the one to initiate the break up? Or she just doesn’t like the cats. Those are the only 2 reasons I can think of.

LunaKip −  NTA. She’s not mad at what you did. She’s mad that she got caught. That said, the fact that you had to do this shows a real breakdown in the relationship. If you want to salvage it, maybe gently sit her down and ask why she felt the need to lie and why she *really* wants to get rid of the cats. You need trust and open communication to get through something like this.

Do you think the Reddit user was justified in their approach to uncover the truth, or did they take it too far? How would you handle a situation where a loved one’s claims don’t add up? Share your thoughts below!