Everybody has their thing. For some, it can be fishing, and for others, it’s collecting stamps.

But one man’s wife has recently turned her passion for true crime into a full-blown obsession, complete with photos, yarn, sticky notes, and other “tools” detectives use on their evidence boards.

Why? Well, she secretly began mapping out potential affairs involving their neighbors, turning local gossip into her own personal investigation.

So her husband went to the subreddit r/AITAH to share his growing concerns and ask for advice.

This woman got so into true crime that she put together a conspiracy board, tracking her neighbors’ potential affairs

Image credits: Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels (not the actual photo)

And her husband believes that she’s gone too far

Image credits: guyswhoshoot / Envato (not the actual photo)

Image credits: cottonbro studio / Pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: throwawaywifeconspir

As the story went viral, its author released an update

Image credits: Castorly Stock / Pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Polina Zimmerman / Pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: throwawaywifeconspir

Image credits: Rahul Shah / Pexels (not the actual photo)

There’s a big difference between men’s and women’s interest in violent nonfiction

A study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that when given a choice of violent reading material, women overwhelmingly opted to read true stories about the death and dismemberment of victims much like themselves. Men, on the other hand, were more likely to choose nonfiction books about war or gang violence than those belonging to the true crime genre.

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“We found that women were more likely than men to choose the true crime book versus the war or the gang violence book and also that they expected to enjoy it more,” said Amanda Vicary, a graduate student who conducted the study with University of Illinois psychology professor R. Chris Fraley.

The research began with an analysis of reviews posted on Amazon.com by readers of books in the true crime and war genres. Coding usernames for gender, the research team discovered that women wrote 70 percent of the reviews of books about true crime, while men wrote 82 percent of the reviews of books on war. Interestingly, the gender of the author appeared to play no role in women’s preference for true crime books.

A second study gave participants summaries of two books and asked them to choose which they would rather read. One summary was a “true account” of the murder of two women in Hawaii. It was paired with either a true story of two female soldiers who died in a Gulf War army unit, or a true account of two female members of a Los Angeles gang who were killed. Women overwhelmingly chose the true crime books over the books about war or gang violence, even when the main characters of all of the books were female.

“Research that has been done in the past about gender and aggression has established pretty clearly that men are more likely to commit violent crimes and they’re more likely to be the victims of violent crimes,” Fraley explained. “So these basic observations are extremely surprising to us. Why are women more drawn to the true crime genre than men are?”

The researchers suggested that women like true crime stories in part because they provide information that feels like it could help them avoid or escape from a potential attacker.

Fraley said that previous studies have shown women are much more likely than men to fear becoming crime victims, and there may be an evolutionary benefit to learning from others’ negative experiences.

To answer this question, the researchers conducted three more studies in which the summaries of the books included details that might help explain the choices women made. They showed that women were much more likely than men to choose a book if it included a “clever trick” the would-be victim used to escape from an attacker, or a psychological profile of the attacker. And women—not men—were much more interested in books with female victims.

“The male participants didn’t care either way,” Vicary added. “They were pretty evenly split, whereas the women wanted to read about the women getting killed.”

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While the findings don’t tell us the level of fascination with the genre that we could consider “normal,” they do partly explain why the Redditor is having a harder time understanding his wife.

People who read what happened think the woman got carried away

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