A bride-to-be has provoked outrage online after revealing she had asked her fiancé to hide his genetic condition for their upcoming wedding photos.
If you are unfamiliar with the Reddit forum, Am I The Asshole, it's essentially a space on the internet for people to air their pressing moral predicaments for strangers to pick apart. The readers ultimately conclude who is said asshole in any given situation.
Sharing her story to the subreddit on Monday, the woman asked her audience whether it was unreasonable that she had suggested her partner wear contact lenses to hide his heterochromia, a condition in which the person has eyes that are two different colours.
In her post, the bride-to-be said it "would be nice" if her partner - who has one blue eye and one brown eye - could have "matching" eyes in their wedding photos. She added that wearing a blue contact over his one brown eye would also allow him to "match" her blue eyes in the snaps.
"My fiancé and I are planning to get married this summer. My fiancé has heterochromia, which I obviously don't have any problems with, but I was thinking that for our wedding photos it would be nice if he wore contact lenses, so his eye colours can match," the woman began.
"I didn't think he would mind my suggestion, but when I brought [it] up to him, he was livid.
"He told me that he thought I didn't mind his eye colours and I said that I obviously didn't, but I would greatly appreciate it if he wore contact lenses to match his eyes' colours for the wedding photos. I said he could even match [his] eye colours with mine, as I have blue eyes, while he has one blue eye and one brown eye."
The woman added that in her eyes, her future husband had "overreacted" and caused her proposal to dissolve into a bitter argument.
"He wasn't receptive to my suggestion at all. I told him he's greatly overreacting, as I don't want him to wear them permanently, just for our wedding photos. But that just led to a bigger argument and we ended up sleeping in different rooms last night."
She then posed the million-dollar question: "AITA [am I the asshole] for asking my fiancé with heterochromia to wear contact lenses for our wedding photos?"
The verdict was quickly made: according to the strangers of the internet, she was, indeed, the asshole.
Taking to the comments, many readers expressed their confusion as to why the woman would want to hide a quirk that makes her partner unique - particularly on the day she plans to legally cement their relationship.
"You say you don't mind his eyes and yet you are so ashamed that you don't want them in your wedding pictures? If you can't be happy standing next to him for who he is, you don't deserve to stand next to him at all," one responded.
Summing up the situation, another wrote: "You're asking him to change a part of who he is so you can have 'perfect' wedding pictures."
A third commented: "If he does this, all he's going to think when he sees those wedding pictures is how his wife was so worried about how they would look that she didn't care about how I felt."
"He wants to look like himself in photos. Himself includes mismatched eyes. Eyes you supposedly fell in love with. Think long and hard about the callousness of your suggestion," a fourth weighed in.
"Heartless… OP [original poster], I assume you're marrying your husband for who he is. And that comes with heterochromia. From his perspective, you're asking him to essentially "normalise" his "abnormality" for the photo album. Cruel, OP. So very cruel," a fifth replied.
And another pitched in: "OP, what would you think if he asked you to photoshop your t*ts because they're slightly asymmetrical? But the pictures would look so much better! You're definitely the asshole."
The post has since been removed by the forum's moderators and the thread has been locked.
Heterochromia is relatively uncommon. According to eye care specialists Auckland Eye, heterochromia is an unusual condition where a person has two different-coloured irises, which naturally occurs in approximately six out of 1000 people who are born with the condition. The colour of the iris is determined by the pigment melanin, and heterochromia is the result of either an excess or lack of melanin.
The most common cause of heterochromia is congenital and the result of a benign mutation affecting the way melanin develops in the irises. In most cases, children born with heterochromia will experience no other symptoms - it is not an eye disease and it does not affect visual acuity.
A few famous examples of congenital heterochromia include Mila Kunis, Jane Seymour, and Simon Pegg. The condition also occurs commonly in animals, especially breeds of dogs such as the Siberian Husky, the Border Collie, the Australian Shepherd and the Chihuahua.
