11/3/11
Question of the Week: When Do You Leave the Bathroom Door Open?

photo via flickr

Occasionally on this site, we ask you guys an impertinent question and you can share your answer in the comments section below. Feel free to share your age, gender, relationship status, sexuality, etc., if you feel that it’s relevant to the answer. This week’s burning (in a good way) question:

When in a relationship do you start to leave the bathroom door open — after the first sleepover? First sex? First anal sex? After you’ve met the parents? Never? (And yes, we know it depends on what’s happening in said bathroom… feel free to make a distinction in your answers!)



10 Comments

  1. I’m a college student at a school with a large number of unisex bathrooms (which is pretty nice, since I identify as genderqueer and my sweetie is bigender). Since I’m dating someone who lives on the dorm floor directly below me, we shared bathroom space almost immediately after getting together. Stalls mean there’s still a degree of privacy for certain functions, but we’ve brushed and flossed and applied zit creams in front of each other many times.

  2. It is a must to leave them closed while any of us is using the toilet. I’m not comfortable with him seeing me that way and seeing him also 🙂 But on all other occasions I don’t mind leaving them open. Especially if I’m taking a shower and he pops in to help me soap my back 😉 or the other way round.

  3. I wouldn’t stay in the room for an extended period of time while my S.O. is pooing, but if I need something in the bathroom I’ll just go get it. I come from an open door kinda family, where I frequently had convos with my parents while they were peeing. My boyfriend’s from a closed-door home, so he has trouble peeing in my presence. But he tries really hard to prove that he is comfortable around me.
    No problem with toothbrushing, though he always laughs at my technique…(apparently I move my entire head during the brushing).
    For the poo I like my privacy.

  4. My husband teased me for years that if I ever came in the bathroom to poo while he was in the shower or something like that then the honeymoon was over. I feel like some things should be private and that’s one of them. Twelve years in we still both shut the door, so never is our answer.

  5. On holiday when the ensuite was right next to the bed anyway so I figured it wouldn’t make any difference seeing as how he could hear me peeing anyway

  6. I’ve been married for 2 years, together for 8.5 and similar to April we leave the unlocked or door open for everything except for when we need to poo/wipe.
    Toothbrushing is no problem.

  7. I’ve been married for 9 years (together for 11) and this is the only relationship where I’ve gotten to the point of leaving doors open. We leave doors open all the time. You could probably remove the bathroom door entirely and we wouldn’t really notice. The only time we request privacy is when someone is going to wipe.

    I can’t really say WHEN this all happened, but I know it was a gradual thing and it probably went down somewhere in the 5th year from what I can remember.

    And since everyone else is covering the topic – I hate seeing my husband brush his teeth, but that’s only because his method annoys me.

  8. Never. I don’t always lock it, and at a certain point in the relationship women get comfortable barging in on me, but I never leave it open.

    ^By the way, I too hate tooth brushing noises. If I hear the noises and see the foam I’ll gag. In my house tooth brushing calls for top-level bathroom privacy.

  9. I’ll never leave the bathroom door open (when using the loo), because my boyfriend thinks that this kills the sex appeal in a partnership. He thinks that one should have certain “secrets” to still perceive the partner as interesting and sexy. And as it’s not too much trouble for me to close a door, I don’t mind.
    When I take a shower, I close the door in order not to have a cold draft, but I don’t mind when bathing.
    Oh, and he MUST close two doors (mine and the bathroom door) when brushing his teeth, as I cannot abide the noises people make when brushing their teeth.

    The thing is that I don’t want to become ONE with him, but stay one individual in a (very happy) partnership with another individual (him). So there’s no problem with having certain taboos, and I really don’t have to see him on the loo. (I’d rather see him come ;-))

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