Photo: Diana Grytsku | Shutterstock
Should she have done it?
By Nia Tipton — Written on Apr 05, 2022
A woman has posted to the subreddit 'AITA' (Am I The A**Hole) asking for advice on if she is in the wrong after deleting pictures of herself from her husband's phone.
The wife explained that she really doesn't like seeing pictures of herself while she is pregnant, and has asked people in her life not to take them.
A few days ago, the woman saw that her husband had changed his lock screen to a photo of her while she is pregnant. When she confronted him about it, he said that when he was away, he missed her and their baby, which is why he took the photo and used it as his lock screen.
"He admitted he had forgotten to change it back before he got home and that every time he went on a business trip he was changing it to pictures of me pregnant," the woman wrote in her Reddit post.
The woman became extremely upset and asked her husband to delete the photo. He agreed to delete it, but the woman had a nagging feeling that he wouldn't actually go through with it.
So, while her husband was sleeping, the woman went through his phone and found that he had taken over a hundred photos of her while she was pregnant.
All of the pictures had been taken without her noticing, including the one she had asked him to delete.
After finding all of the photos, the woman then deleted them. Of course, her husband immediately noticed that all of the pictures were missing, and was upset by the fact that she had deleted them.
"We had an argument and he made a big show of changing his phone passcode and implied he had the pictures backed up," the woman added at the end of her post.
There were some people under the Reddit thread who were in agreement that the woman was the one in the wrong, labeling her as "YTA", or "you're the a**hole".
"YTA (you're the a**hole). You cannot go into his phone and delete photos. He isn’t posting them on social, just keeping them to himself. I think it’s sweet. You sound like you have some pretty serious body hang-ups and I would encourage you to talk to someone about that," one user commented.
Another user commented, "It's perfectly normal. But remember he loves you. He is so happy for his wife and his new family and you tried to permanently delete that out of his life. I recommend not being so vain about it. Realize you are being vain about your pregnancy body. But tell him, "just don't let me see those damn pictures again."
While there were some people who were against the woman, there were a number of people who agreed that she should be allowed to have her privacy.
"She didn't want those photos taken of her, he took them against her will and explicit wishes. She 100% has the moral right to destroy every single copy of them. Your opinion of if those photos are good to have is irrelevant, and no, she doesn't need therapy for having her boundaries violated," one user commented.
Another user commented, "This is not just about vanity. Husband violated her boundaries over 100 times. She probably shouldn’t have deleted them, but they should not have existed in the first place. If it was a handful of shots, maybe it would feel more excusable but he took her picture when he knew she didn’t want him or anyone to do so and he did it over and over and over. That’s actually creepy, not cute."
The verdict as a whole remained quite divided — a pretty even split between the "YTA" and "NTA" in the comments.
One Redditor called frothingcookie explained their "ESH" ("Everyone's The A**hole") pretty succinctly, "You are 100% entitled to not want photos of you out there. However, you asked him to remove the one, and then went into his phone and deleted 100+ without his permission." They concluded their comment with a final edit, explaining that "boundaries and consent are extremely serious," and that the "topic is not as black and white as people are claiming it is. 2 wrongs don’t make a right."
Nia Tipton is a writer living in Brooklyn. She covers pop culture, social justice issues, and trending topics. Follow her on Instagram.