Step son used my bath towel

[Green0911]

Want to gauge if IABU here.

My and my husband's towels are in the bathroom. Teenage SS keeps his in his room. We each have a hand towel and a bath towel. They all get changed every 3-4 days. When it came to changing them, I realised SS didn't have his towels in his room. He said he'd put them to be laundered a few days before. When I asked him which towels he'd been using in the meantime (he'd showered at least twice during this period), initially he claimed none, then admitted he'd used mine.

I blew a fuse. Couldn't believe he thought this was acceptable. Husband has laughed it off and is accusing me of being dramatic/blowing things out of proportion.

AIBU?

It isn't, but I've just never felt the need to dry every body part so thoroughly. I wrap the towel around myself getting out of the bath and pat my arms and legs dry and the rest of you just dries. I'm sure that scrubbing your intimate parts dry with a towel is not a healthy thing to do.

Wow. This thread has been a real eye-opener.

No wonder the rest of Europe view the British as dirty. The fact that the majority of posters on here think the OP is overreacting and making a fuss about nothing proves it.

If anyone else (my own partner, child, whatever), repeatedly used my towel, and I had unknowingly used it afterwards, I would go completely apeshit. I do not want to inadvertently dry my face or fanny on the same bit of cloth they've dried their (likely not washed thoroughly), arse crack on.

OP, the dirty little bastard used yours on purpose as well. It was a very intentional "fuck you" that he knew could be passed off innocently to his father and make you look mental.

30 pages so obviously not trawling through that, but adding to the inevitable pile of responses saying the same - towels are used to dry clean bodies. He obviously has fine hygiene if he has showered a few times in a few days.

If they really had been "exceptionally poor" surely the whole family would be sharing the bath water?

My family really were poor and we shared bathwater

There are one heck of a lot of uneducated posters here.

And one or two patronising ones too .....🙄

Yabu- there is either a lot more to this or this is the straw that has broken a camels back

Teenagers are still children and you need to cut him slack

Try to see the positive he feels insecure with you to use your towel if he has thought about it

If he was your child would you feel the same

No, and I don't have damp crevices either. In fact, if I'm getting out of a hot shower I'm mostly dry by the time I get back to the bedroom anyway, and certainly by the time I've sat on the towel for 15 minutes thinking about motivating myself to do something, faffed around trying to decide what to wear and working out if I can get away with putting fresh PJs on and staying in all day, scrolled my phone to see if I've missed anything important in the 10 minutes it took me to shower and finally noticed that my lunchbreak is nearly up and I need to log back in whilst pulling some clothes on.

It's good that you flipped, OP. He won't be doing that again in a hurry.

I remember growing up in a household of 4. A bath towel was on the radiator and everyone used it for whatever. No hand towel just the one towel

He’ll be laughing at OP, like his father did. Unable to understand the over reaction.

Yes blowing a fuse over a towel is absolutely the correct way to have dealt with this.

I use a gym towel every time I go to the gym. It would no doubt have been used by countless sweaty people to dry all their bits & bobs. And yet I'm v healthy and live to tell the tale

@changecandles

I don't mind sharing my dh towel on occasion but my son? That's ew. I don't have sex with my son or stepson if I had one and I don't suck their penises. I also don't get close up and personal with their butt cracks.

So you're saying that if you're prepared to suck someone's penis then sharing a towel with them is alright, if you're not, it's not? OK... that's a very bizarre hygiene benchmark.

Leaving aside the fact that its slightly creepy and unnecessary that you've chosen to emphasise that you don't suck your son's penis or stare at his bum crack (phew), it's a very odd and irrational threshold for the point at which you no longer need to worry about bacteria and microbes.

If you share a living space with people, regardless of whether you engage in sexual contact with them, you will be sharing millions of microbes with them. It's virtually impossible to prevent that happening. You could spend every waking hour washing towels and washing your arse etc and still there would be no guarantee. Unless you are living in a completely hermetically sealed environment you can't prevent this.

It's true that towels harbour microbes. As do clothes and linen and eating utensils and most other things people have in their homes. Washing them as often as possible is advisable.

But its bizarre that having designated towels is being held up as the threshold of acceptable hygiene. It's one of a menu of behaviours to help keep people healthy but in and of itself it isn't a silver bullet, it will make only a marginal difference. And this outburst of pearl clutching (or towel clutching) about this is completely absurd.

Gross, bet that was shoved right up his crack for a good flossing.

You need to boil wash yourself and burn the towel, buy yourself a new one in unicorn/girlie colours.

You are being ridiculous and offensive. Exactly how do you know he "did it on purpose" to insult OP? Why are you trying to further damage an already rocky relationship between a stepmother and her young stepson?

Or the son drying his face with towel that’s been round his mum’s vulva 😂😂😂

Wow!! Imagine living in your head!

I wouldn’t have been too happy but I wouldn’t have blown a fuse or got angry. What’s done is done.

Blimey - we share bath water and towels in our house, and don't wash them after every use either...partly for environmental reasons and partly just being a bit slatternly. I'm surprised we're still alive.

In answer to the OP's original question, yes YABU.

Honestly couldn't get worked up about this, would you react the same if it was your own son?
Growing up many moons ago I was one of 5 kids, pretty sure we didn't have 7 towels in use at any one time and no one died or caught diseases from each other

Presumably he’s fresh out the barn when using the towel so what’s the issue?

You are being extremely precious.
You blew a fuss? It's not unusual for households to share towels
Poor stepson .

I’d rather not. It seems to be an awful place.