Woman says she spent a year feeding her roommate’s dog whenever she went out — and then found out the roommate was “jealous” of the bond
In a Reddit post later shared on Best of Redditor Updates, one woman said she had spent the better part of a year sliding into responsibilities that were never supposed to be hers. According to the update, she had been living with a roommate who regularly asked her to feed, water, or bring in the roommate’s dog whenever she went out, which was happening multiple times a week. It had gotten to the point where the roommate would message her even when they were both out, still expecting her to somehow make sure the dog was taken care of. What started as helping here and there had slowly turned into an unspoken routine where the dog’s care kept landing in her lap.
She said the whole thing had worn on her more than she realized. In the comments before the update, she admitted that part of the problem was that she had a hard time saying no and had let people walk over her in friendships before. That seems to be why this one crept up on her the way it did. She liked the dog, wanted to help, and kept stepping in, but the arrangement had reached a point where it was affecting her own plans and making her feel like she had to stay mentally on call for an animal that was not hers. The tone of the post made it clear she was less angry than exhausted, which honestly made it feel even more real.
When she finally brought it up, she said she told the roommate she wanted to step back from doing those things because, in the end, it was not her dog and not her responsibility. But the conversation took a weird turn almost immediately. According to the update, the roommate claimed she had already been meaning to talk about it because she felt bad about how much help she had been asking for. Then came the part that made the story tilt into classic Reddit territory: the roommate also said she was worried the poster was getting “too attached” to the dog and that she was feeling jealous about it. The poster sounded baffled by that explanation, saying the only real change was that she greeted the dog more playfully now and felt more comfortable having it around, which is not exactly shocking when someone has spent a year helping care for it.
That jealousy comment seemed to confirm something bigger for her. She wrote that she used it as even more reason to stop helping, especially because the whole setup had already started making her feel like she had to keep tabs on the dog all the time. She also directly asked why the roommate would still text her for updates or ask her to feed the dog when both of them were out of the house. The roommate’s answer, according to the post, was that it would be too late or too expensive for her to Uber back home. In other words, the dog’s care had become something she was trying to solve with the poster’s time and availability instead of her own.
There was also another layer underneath all of this that made the living situation feel even more lopsided. The woman said she had been putting off getting a pet of her own for a year because of the roommate’s dog and because the roommate did not want her to ask the landlord for permission. She said the excuses kept changing—wait until you’ve lived there longer, wait until after inspection, wait until the lease is renewed. The goalposts just kept moving. So eventually she asked the landlord herself and found out he was perfectly fine with it. That seems to have been one of those small but clarifying moments where a person realizes how much of their life has been quietly shaped by someone else’s preferences without any real reason behind it.
By the end of the update, she said she felt lighter after finally putting her foot down. She was not doing dog care anymore, she had stopped wanting constant update requests from the roommate, and she seemed to be waking up to how much of her own routine had been dictated by this one arrangement. In the comments, she even hinted that moving out might be the next step, saying she was planning to leave when the lease was up. What makes the story work is that it is not explosive in some huge, cinematic way. It is messier than that. It is about how resentment builds when helping somebody slowly becomes obligation, and how bizarre it is to realize the person leaning on you that hard might also be resentful that their dog likes you too much.
