I'm a 19M living in the college dorms with one other roommate. I'll just get straight to the point: he smells really bad.

The room itself is already small to begin with, so the smell easily makes its way around, no matter what I do. Air fresheners, plug-ins, blasting the fans and air purifiers, keeping the windows open all day. Nothing helps. And it's all because of his towel.

It has a really strong smell of mildew and it's actually unbearable. I've had a lot of talks with him having to ask for him to wash it, which he has kind of gotten annoyed of recently, but the very next day the smell just comes back.

I've considered just buying him a new one and saying I accidentally like stained his old one or something, but I'm more concerned with the fact that the smell comes back so quickly right after he washes it.

So enough was enough and I decided to take action when he said he was going out for the weekend. I took his towel and deep washed it in baking soda and bleach a FEW times and it finally smelled relatively fresh. And the next day (with him still gone) the room already smelled SO MUCH better.

I thought life was up from there because I finally found a solution, but when he came back I got a text of him asking if I washed his towel. I admitted to him that the smell was just overbearing and I had to do it for health reasons at this point, but he started going off on me for invading his privacy and that there are boundaries for our belongings.

I felt really bad because we never got into an argument before, but I was truly just concerned for our health in that room. I even used one of my lavender dryer sheets because he complimented it before :( He hasn't really talked to me since, which was just this past weekend, and of course, the smell is freaking back already. I understand I invaded his privacy with that but it really comes to a point. AITA?