Submitted by idiothsband t3_10hzcws in tifu
I (32M) have had an inside joke with my wife (30F) for ten years. As it turns out, I’m the only one on the inside. My wife has a small, but dark brown mark on the top of her left iris. It’s pretty hard to see unless her eyes are wide open, but when we were first dating, she mentioned that she had a speck on her eye. I was trying to be polite, so I told her I couldn't really see it. A few days later, the topic of the mark on her eye came up again and she asked if I really couldn't see it or if I was being nice, because to her, it was very noticeable. I playfully said I couldn't see anything.
Over the years it became a back and forth where she would insist that I can see it and me denying it– for me it turned into a funny joke. She would take a picture of her iris, zoom in on the brown speck and say “How do you not see that?!” and I would play dumb. Whenever I denied it, I always had a goofy smirk and used a sarcastic tone, hinting that yes, I really can see it. It was just another one of our many inside jokes and I thought of how long to let it ride. I even thought about when was the perfect time to give up the gag – maybe even slip it into our wedding vows… Thankfully I did not do that.
Fast-forward to today and we were talking about heterochromia in huskies which led to the topic of my wife’s eye and she was noticeably angry. She took a picture of her iris again and zoomed in and demanded to know if it was some kind of sick joke.
She said I was gaslighting her and then it just clicked–I was gaslighting her. She went on to say, it wasn't funny to her at all. It started out as annoying , but she would go around to her friends and family members and ask if they could see the mark. Everyone would say yes but she still questioned if they were just being nice or if I was telling the truth and she really doesn't have a mark on her eye. For years she was tortured with the idea that she might be going crazy over whether or not she actually had a small brown mark on her iris and I realized how big of a fu I made.
I immediately fessed up, didn't even try to explain myself, and I apologized as sincerely. To me it was a joke that we were both going to laugh about when I finally caved and admitted it, but to her I was just lying to her for TEN years. I am an idiot. I told her there were no more running gags in the works and that I owe her at least a full day of pampering.
TL;DR I pretended my wife didn't have a discoloration in her eye for ten years thinking I was being cheeky, but was actually driving her insane.
Edit: I feel like I should clarify a few things.
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I think the use of "insane" in my tl;dr was too strong and gave the wrong impression of how my wife felt. She said she felt frustrated and annoyed, which I totally get.
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This "gag" was pretty infrequent. It would come up maybe once a year at most, but what annoyed my wife, understandably, was that I kept it going for ten years.
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A lot of people have asked "how is that a joke?" or "how is that funny?". It was kind of our sense of humor when we first started dating. We use to tease each other by playing dumb about something until the joke ran just a little too long. Dumb stuff like, "Did you eat the rest of the pizza in the fridge?" "Nope, in fact I don't think there was any left". As we got older, we realized how annoying it was and stopped but the eye thing was so infrequent that it felt funny (to me) to keep it running after so long. Unfortunately, she wasn't sure if I really could see it and I thought she knew I could so here we are.
Edit 2:
One additional point of clarity because a lot of people are assuming my wife is seriously bothered by the blemish on her eye—shes not. I initially said I couldn't really see it to be polite because I didn't know her well enough to know if it did bother her. She probably wouldn't have thought about it half as much if I didn't make a big deal about not seeing it.