Help! He keeps stealing my chocolate

The prosecution Lucy Niko helps himself when he finds my box of snacks – and then blames me for buying them

I have a little hoard of chocolate but Niko, my partner of 10 years, doesn’t like me having snacks in the flat. He’ll sometimes eat one in a weak moment, and then get annoyed at me for it. But nobody makes him eat them.

Sometimes I’ll get to the snack box, really looking forward to what I’ve saved, and see that it’s gone. Once my friends bought me a box of Happy Hippos for my birthday and Niko ate the lot. Another time I was really looking forward to some delicious Italian biscuits but Niko had already polished them off. I phoned him to say, “What have you done?” But not only does he help himself to my snacks, but he’ll also blame me for buying them afterwards!

Niko says he has to eat them before they go off – even if he doesn’t want to. He says he does it to prevent food waste. This is kind of true: I do store lots of things, as I like to have a choice. Niko is always nagging me to finish off the open packets before I bring new sweets into the house. But him saying that I should eat my old treats before buying new ones puts pressure on me and encourages unhealthy habits.

It makes me think: God, do I have to eat this now? Am I going to binge? Growing up as a young girl in the UK you do get pressed to look a certain way and mind your diet. When

I went to secondary school in the 2000s, teenage boys were horrible to us girls. They’d call me fat because I loved food so much, even though I was never overweight. I’d be the one at break really savouring a chocolate muffin.

I’ve always loved sweets. But I had to fight hard not to be affected by others’ opinions when the girls around me were on diets. I am obsessive about my chocolate now, maybe because I had to fight off dysfunctional food habits as a teenager. At the moment I keep all the sweets in a tall cupboard that you need to stand on a chair to get to, so it’s on Niko if he finds them. He has really strong willpower, so I’m not sure why he always blames me when he eats my chocolate.