"Am I The Jerk For Putting My Fiancé's Food In A Child's Bowl?"

When love and sickness collide, it can often lead to a delicate balancing act. While one partner finds themselves taking on the role of caretaker, the other tries to get as much rest as possible without becoming too much of a burden.

In the case of Reddit user Piggymills, that didn't go too well. The woman's fiancé, who she values very much in life, turns into a "pathetic baby" whenever he's ill. This got particularly annoying at the height of the pandemic when the man contracted a simple cold but acted as if it was a terrible life-threatening disease.

The last straw was him asking for his food to be cut up. Piggymills couldn't take it anymore and decided to respond by highlighting how ridiculous that request really was. Later, though, she started having doubts if she overreacted, so she told what happened to the 'Am I the [Jerk]?' community, inviting them to share their two cents on the conflict.

Credits: piggymills

All of this sounds like a prime example of man flu. The term is so ubiquitous that it has been included in the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries. The prior defines it as "a cold or similar minor ailment as experienced by a man who is regarded as exaggerating the severity of the symptoms."

It's a popular theory, but the scientific evidence for it is far from conclusive. Some research, however, has shown that male and female immune cells react differently to invading viruses.

One study in mice added a lot of fuel to the fire, suggesting that the male sex really does get hit harder by certain illnesses—and that physiology, not psychology, may be at least partially to blame.

Published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, it found that adult male mice displayed more symptoms of sickness than females when they were exposed to bacteria that cause an illness with symptoms similar to the flu. The males also had more fluctuations in body temperature, fever, and signs of inflammation, and took longer to recover.

Of course, studies done in lab animals do not necessarily apply to humans, so this research should be taken with a grain of salt. But experts who research gender and immunity say that it raises an intriguing scientific question for people, as well.

According to Sabra Klein, associate professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tests with human cells do, in fact, show that male immune cells have more active receptors for certain pathogens.

"It isn't always the presence of the microbe or the presence of the virus that makes us sick," Klein told TIME. "It's our immune response, and the research shows that males have a heightened response that summons cells to the site of infection, which contributes to the overall feeling of sickness."

The reason why isn't yet understood, but one hypothesis holds that testosterone and estrogen affect these immune receptors in different ways. Klein's own 2015 study on human cells, for instance, discovered that estrogen-based compounds made it harder for a flu virus to infect the samples.

So while men probably shouldn't ask their partner to baby-feed them when they have a runny nose, their groans might be valid.