Why would a grown man have a problem with the bedroom door being closed at night?

He can’t be aware of what is going on in the house if the door
is closed, may make him uncomfortable and unable to relax and sleep. I do this so if anything happens at night I stand a better chance of detecting it and doing something. Some rooms just get stuffy when people are sleeping in the same closed up area. He could also be claustraphobc.

IDK. It seems to me that that is straightforward, simple explanation, but the clerk said he told her he didn’t know why. He just hated it.

They don’t have a bathroom, or a night light in their room. He has walked into the door a few times when he got up to pee in the middle of the night.
Also she hung a mirror on the back side of the door. At night, without his glasses, he thinks the door is open. Bang!

LOL!! OR he SHOT the guy!

You might be listening to the voice of experience.
Don’t you hate it when that happens?

I like my door open or at least cracked, who knows what his reasoning is but I’d assume it has to do with feeling shut off, cut off from the rest of the house. Even when I ws still married and my daughter was at home I kept my bedroom door open about a foot or so at night to hear what was going on downstairs .

I like to hear if someone is breaking into my house…
hence the bedroom door stays open as the children
are long gone.

If that’s the worst of his quirks, she’s a fortunate woman. I was once involved with a gorgeous woman who was obsessed with the bedroom window remaining wide open regardless of the weather. She had actually paid for a huge awning to thwart the rain, but the Winter was the time when both her cat & I had serious deliberations over invitations to “spend the night”.

@Coloma as I said, when my kids were home I left the door cracked too.

Oh, I cold sleep with the window open no matter what, too, @stanleybmanly! Under piles of blankies. My dad let me do it, but I had to leave my bedroom door tightly shut so it wouldn’t kick on the heat in the rest of the house.

Too personal a question to ask directly, but has he ever been in jail or in Navy submarines?

Oh, I have no idea. I didn’t know the clerk beyond that. But it is a good question. Bad memories, maybe? I mean, to me, the answers you all are giving are good ones, and easy to pinpoint. That’s why I thought it was odd that, when she asked him, he got kind of mad and said he didn’t know, he just hated it.

I’m a grown adult and I have a hard time sleeping with a closet door open. Too many horror movies and serial killer stories from my police officer father as a young’un, I suppose, but I just feel better with the closet shut.

So if the question is about the clerk’s husband, and she says he doesn’t know, then we can only make guesses. Mine would be that he has an issue which he doesn’t remember where it came from, which probably everyone has, but we (or more often, others) only (rarely) notice it, as by definition it is something we’ve buried from our conscious thoughts. Often that’s because our defense mechanisms chose not to deal with it by covering it up. Could be anything from an irrational childhood fear, to molestation, or anything, and may likely be connected to many layers of subconscious programming.

I hate closing my door at night.

For two reasons. One, by bedroom gets too hot. I need the heat to flow out of the room. I keep the temperature pretty low but my bedroom gets most of the heat. The best way I have found to regulate it is if I keep the door open. If I don’t I will wake up in the middle of the night covered in sweat.

The second is being able to possibly hear if anyone breaks in the house, or if any of the gas or fire detectors go off in the basement floor or the first floor. It would be good to be able to hear it before it has to hit my detector up on the 3rd floor. I live in a town home. But even when I lived in a flat level home, I still wanted to be alerted before the smoke or fire is closer to me. Every second counts in a fire.

It might also be he is slightly claustrophobic. Or just use to it from childhood. I grew up in a home where all our doors were open when everyone was in bed. Mostly so our folks could hear us. Most of the time, it was just slightly ajar.

I don’t have to worry about breakins. I have two dogs. One, the border collie, Dutchess, would go apeshit screaming. The other, a German Shepherd, Dakota, would quietly crouch low, wait patiently, and when the burglar came in her sights she’d quietly tackle him, like a silent, deadly ghost ourt of now where, and hold him by the throat. Can she do that? Yes. She tackled me once, when we first got her! And another time, when Dutchess was little, and misbehaving. She slapped her down and pinned her by the throat to the deck, until she promised to behave.

@Seek It’s okay, you can come out of the closet. lol
I always like those horror movies where people are hiding behind the louvered closet doors peering through the slats as the killer walks by. haha

@Dutchess_III My dog will only try to make friends with the burglar. Plus she sleeps in my room in her kennel. She doesn’t bark for some reason when she is in her kennel.

@Seek I used to feel the same way about the closet. Then I got too old and lazy to get out of bed to close it, so I just said “I’ll kick your ass if you come out of there tonight!” and went to sleep.

I still gets the chills sometimes thinking about a cold dead hand reaching out from under the bed and grabbing my foot if I leave it out of the covers dangling over the side.

ROFLOLL!!! That’s just me @ARE_you_kidding_me, asking for you to get me a cookie and some milk.

The unreasoning fear / loathing / dislike, the inability to articulate or even to rationalize “a reason why” and the strong (angry) emotion point to a general phobia.

My first thought was that something happened to him as a child and so he has this traumatic memory of it.

I’m wondering why the wife doesn’t just ask him.

Maybe he feels that if it’s just the two of them in the house, they don’t need any additional privacy but if there are other kids or adults in the house, then it can go either way.

I’m a relatively fearless guy but I hate having my bedroom door completely closed. I sleep upstairs and want to hear if a baddie gains entry (you never know where Trump will turn up). Plus I get better circulation in my bedroom if the door is open.

@jca she DID ask him. He had no answer, just that he hates it. You need to start reading the details, girlfriend.

I did read the details @Dutchess_III but if I were his wife, I’d delve a bit deeper than just accepting that he has no answer. I was in children’s services, and if we asked a question there was some kind of answer.

Honestly, and this may sound bad but I have been known to not give an explanation because it is too exhausting to go on a big rant about “why” when the other person simply will not comprehend or understand. It’s sometimes hard not to indirectly insult the other person or come off as condescending in those situations. Sometimes it will lead to other questions that the person asking will be uncomfortable knowing the answers to such as break-ins in the neighborhood. When someone refuses to give an explanation it’s not exclusively uncomfortable for the person being asked.

I agree with @stanleybmanly. Seems like not such a difficult thing to live with.

Long ago I was married to a woman who smoked in bed and had to have the TV blaring in our bedroom all night. I don’t recall her doing that when we were dating. Anyway, I took about a month of that and then moved into my own room for the duration of our marriage.

Well, I guess I am easy to sleep with, no TV blaring, no smoking in bed ( gah ) no windows wide open in the dead of winter. That’s crazy! haha

Not only could I not sleep in the winter with the windows wide open, but it’s an awful waste of heat (and money)!

@jca I don’t know this woman at all and it was just a short,casual, non-deep conversation. But if I ever see her again I’ll tell her you said to dig deeper.
However, if he gets angry and defensive, digging deeper might not be such a good plan.

If he’s her hubby and she can’t have a reasonable conversation with him without him getting angry and defensive, then her problems are bigger than having the door open or closed.

If a person pushed you on an issue you were sensitive about, and didn’t want to talk about, and they kept digging and digging and pushing, how would you feel?

In the case of the door, it affects both husband and wife. I don’t consider a reasonable conversation to be anything that the husband should flip out over. Just my opinion. It’s ok if others don’t agree with it.

Just because you don’t think it’s not reasonable,doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Not everyone is going to react the way you think they should. If your opinion is that it’s time to throw in the towel, after 20 years of marriage, because a particular situation has one person so upset that they don’t want to talk about it, then your idea of marriage is very shallow.

@Dutchess_III; I’m open to being wrong but I stated my opinion.

Your advice never takes into account the human factor, and human emotions. It’s just, “Talk about it!” like that’s all anyone ever needs to do to fix things.

@Dutchess_III Well..in an intimate relationship I would be very concerned if my partner couldn’t/wouldn’t be able to express why they had an issue with a closed bedroom door.
Whether that reason was simple or more complicated.
I mean, it’s a freaking bedroom door. Not like your asking a known abuse victim to share every nasty detail of their abuse. An adult that can’t simply offer up a reasonable reason such as ” my mom used lock me in my room when I was bad” or ” I feel claustrophobic when the door is closed” would concern me.

I’d feel they were being irrationally weird.
I rinse glasses before I use them because as a kid I once drank some water from a glass that still has soap residue in it and that experience facilitated my glass rinsing, even if it is my own glass that I know I already rinsed well. I wouldn’t have a problem divulging my quirk if someone noticed and asked.
Healthy adults should be able to articulate their thoughts and emotions.

Well, for all I know that’s exactly what his problem is / was, maybe abuse of some kind, and he just doesn’t want to talk about it.

@Dutchess_III: and to add to what @Coloma said, it’s not like he’s being asked to discuss his issue with the door with strangers in on the internet or with the other teachers in the teachers’ lounge or whatever. It’s his wife.

So? There are some things I don’t like to discuss with my husband. That’s my right.

Besides, what good would it do?