AITA for making my daughter think her boyfriend cheated?

Dear Confessions,

My daughter and her fiancé are currently living with me and my wife. To be honest I don't like him and they have both begun to drive me insane. I have issued the ultimatum and told them they need to find somewhere else to live as I can't handle having them both under my roof anymore.

My daughter was doing their washing the other day and I guess a pair of my wife's underwear got mixed in with theirs. I recognised the pattern on them immediately and knew they were my wife's. My daughter jumped to the conclusion that her fiancé had been cheating on her though and she thought that was how the underwear ended up in their washing basket.

To me, that already says plenty about how stable their relationship is.

She was crying and waving the underwear around, shouting at him about how she couldn't believe he would do this to her. Obviously, he was denying everything.

After about half an hour, my wife arrived home and told them that they were her underwear and that they must have gotten mixed in. She then looked at me and asked if I just didn't recognise them.

I burst out laughing. My daughter stomped to her room crying and hasn't spoken to me since. Her fiancé said I was "fucked up" and left the house. Am I the arsehole?

Yes. I think that was a cruel thing to do to your daughter and her fiancé.

Put yourself in the shoes of your daughter, she is in love with someone who she trusted and was then lead to believe he had cheated on her. Imagine the heart-break you would feel if your wife cheated on you and the trust that had been built between you was suddenly gone.

We live in a world now where the younger generations will struggle to maintain relationships the same way older generations do and did. Cheating on your partner is easier than it ever has been before and many people get away with it. A lot of the younger generation have seen people cheat or act in a disrespectful way towards their partner and so it is easy to believe that most people will do this given the chance.

To deliberately put your daughter in a position where she feels like her trust has been violated is awful.

Now, put yourself in the position of her faithful fiancé. Imagine being accused of cheating and knowing that you have never and would never do anything of the sort. Your partner not believing you or trusting you is awful. It is possible that her lack of belief in him ends their relationship.

On the otherside of that though. You have also proved that your daughter can't trust her own instincts when it comes to cheating. If he were even tempted to cheat, he might just have the opportunity now knowing that he may be able to gaslight her into thinking she is imagining it. Again.

I am concerned by your reaction to this situation. I understand having people underfoot can be frustrating, however you showed a complete lack of empathy to your daughter and a lack of remorse for the upset that was caused in this situation. You sat and watched your daughter cry and felt no need to respond.

Not only do I think you are the arsehole in this situation, I think you really need to do some inner work and explore some of the issues you seem to have. If I were you and I wanted to maintain a relationship with my daughter, I would apologise.