Husband Wonders Whether He’s a Jerk for Forcing His Wife to Get Up to Her Alarm

What kind of sleeper are you?

According to experts, there are six types of sleepers:

• Morning lark. Most active from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. This person then gets sleepy throughout the day and feels more exhausted than all other types of sleepers when evening comes.
• Afternoon person. Active between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m but sleepy in both morning and evening.



• Napper. Alert from the beginning of the day till lunch. Feels sleepy between 1 pm and 3 pm, then gets revitalized till late evening.
• Night owl. Difficulty in getting up in the morning until 10 am. But this is a person capable of accomplishing more tasks during the day once fully awake and feels sleepy again in late night.
• Woodcock. Feels sleepy all the time.
• Swift. Alert from the moment this person wakes up until returning to bed to sleep at night.

But what happens when a “swift” get married to a “night owl”?

This husband posted his dilemma on Reddit’s r/AmItheA–hole forum: “My wife has a habit of setting an alarm clock to go off at 6:15 a.m. every morning. She never, ever wakes up for it. She rolls over, hits snooze, and goes back to sleep. Over and over again until 7:05 a.m. This is incredibly annoying for me. I am a very light sleeper. The second that alarm clock goes off the first time, I’m up for the day. My own personal alarm clock is set for 7:15 a.m. I haven’t even heard it go off in many months.”

Fed up with his wife’s sleeping habit, he tried to force her to get up one morning when her alarm went off. He tapped her shoulder, turned on all the lights, stomped around the room, and made noises as he got dressed. He could no longer hide his frustration, and now he’s asking the AITA community if he’s being an a–hole.

Well, many of the commenters say he’s NTA. But most of them also admit that they are “night owls” too, just like his wife, and struggle to wake up to their alarms.

One commenter, like this husband, may lack an understanding of different kinds of sleepers: “NTA, she shouldn’t set an alarm if she doesn’t intend to wake up to it. There are better solutions nowadays, such as a fitness tracker equipped with a ‘silent alarm’ feature that vibrates on her wrist and wakes her that way.”

This Reddit user is more honest with own sleeping habit: “I have 9 alarms set to make sure I get to work on time…. I hate being on morning shift (prefer swing but I’m stuck and I like my site), and I have ADHD, I don’t even think I wake up at all most of the time for the first few, I turn them off while still being technically asleep… gf sleeps through my alarms just as I will sleep through hers, so it works out, for us.

“NAH (no a-holes here): it may be actually impossible for her to wake up fully the first time, if she is naturally attuned to later in the day, the only solution may be for her to find a job that starts later since you can’t sleep thru her alarm. She should try a vibrating alarm though. My sister has narcolepsy and she recently got one that actually zaps her like a training collar. She likes it so far.”

This person, who’s also a night owl, wants to help the couple with this advice: “Ok, so, in the wife’s defense, I too set many alarms, because I struggle to wake, so the first one wakes me enough to turn it off, the next wakes me a little more, so on and so forth, until usually 30 minutes later, my final alarm goes off. I do agree that the out loud alarm is a d-ck move. My suggestion is to keep her phone under her pillow. That is what I do, so that I can listen to music through my pillow, (I have a purple pillow, no clue about the effectiveness of other pillows) without waking my roommate, and the alarm is muffled for him too.”