AITA for logging onto my roommate's phone and changing her background image?
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I (29M) live just with my roommate, "R" (29F) in the East Coast (I do have romantic feelings for her). R is a high school teacher, and during the 2024-2025 school year (ending this summer 2025), she was the homeroom teacher for a Japanese exchange student, who at the time was 15. He had thick, wavy hair and was a very friendly-looking person, and was pretty popular with his female classmates. She bonded exceptionally well with this student, because R herself is half-White, half-Japanese. She bonded well enough that during his last days in the US, she told him to keep in touch, and to send pictures of his graduation (which I consider to be crossing a boundary).
This past October, we learnt that the Japanese exchange student died from the extreme pressures of academics and social isolation back home. R was extremely distraught, and spent a while binging on alcohol to cope with it.
So shortly after we found out that the Japanese boy had died, I found out that R actually has a picture of that boy as the background image for her phone! While I respect her grief, I took this as another huge violation of boundaries (imagine if it was a male teacher who had a picture of his female student on his phone). While she was drunk and sleeping, I had grabbed her phone and just changed the background picture (I did figure out her password a while ago, by the way). I didn't really care that she would find out later on, because I needed her to (1) see that she's crossed all these boundaries, and (2) move on, for her own sake.
AITA?
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I (29M) live just with my roommate, "R" (29F) in the East Coast (I do have romantic feelings for her). R is a high school teacher, and during the 2024-2025 school year (ending this summer 2025), she was the homeroom teacher for a Japanese exchange student, who at the time was 15. He had thick, wavy hair and was a very friendly-looking person, and was pretty popular with his female classmates. She bonded exceptionally well with this student, because R herself is half-White, half-Japanese. She bonded well enough that during his last days in the US, she told him to keep in touch, and to send pictures of his graduation (which I consider to be crossing a boundary).
This past October, we learnt that the Japanese exchange student died from the extreme pressures of academics and social isolation back home. R was extremely distraught, and spent a while binging on alcohol to cope with it.
So shortly after we found out that the Japanese boy had died, I found out that R actually has a picture of that boy as the background image for her phone! While I respect her grief, I took this as another huge violation of boundaries (imagine if it was a male teacher who had a picture of his female student on his phone). While she was drunk and sleeping, I had grabbed her phone and just changed the background picture (I did figure out her password a while ago, by the way). I didn't really care that she would find out later on, because I needed her to (1) see that she's crossed all these boundaries, and (2) move on, for her own sake.
AITA?
Yea, yta
