A woman on Reddit is conflicted about how to address her boyfriend’s poor dental health, which is affecting their love life as she can’t even force herself to kiss him.
“My partner [and] I both grew up in poverty. We both have rotten teeth. My teeth, I took initiative to fix between 16-18. After [three] years of dental work, I met my partner immediately after. When we first met, he obviously had tooth decay but I wasn’t bothered by it,” she wrote on Reddit.
“I ended up getting pregnant QUICK. No time to decide things. Sometime during my pregnancy it became obvious how bad his teeth actually were, one of them broke off and he needed an emergency extraction,” the woman continued, adding he doesn’t currently have dental insurance.
“He needs probably [four to five] teeth removed fully. At this point he needs dentures or veneers. At some point, I stopped kissing him. During pregnancy I just found it really gross on top of morning sickness. Now it’s been [two] years and he can’t get any dental work done,” she shared, revealing her boyfriend is hurt by her “lack of affection toward him.”
“He thinks I don’t love him, but really he was diagnosed with late stage gingivitis and the dentist told us it’s contagious with long term exposure. I spent a long time prioritizing my dental health. I have no idea how to help him, we just don’t have the money [and] every week his teeth get worse … What do I do?” she concluded her post.
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In the comments section, readers sympathized with the woman’s difficult situation.
“See if there’s a dental college nearby. Sometimes they will provide free care by the more advanced students,” one person wrote.
“Obviously he is well aware that his teeth are a problem … I imagine it would be less hurtful to him to know that you aren’t kissing him because you are worried about getting gingivitis again than for him to go on thinking you don’t love him,” another commented.
“I think that the only way that you can frame it without it completely destroying him is to explain that the condition that he has is contagious and that you already can’t afford to fix his dental problems so if you end up infected with the same condition, you’ve got no chance of being able to fix the problem for two people,” someone else shared.