This writer, for one, is deathly afraid of cockroaches, especially those that can fly.
But often times, when we encounter one of these creepy crawlies, the immediate reaction would usually be to scream our heads off and run for dear life, and after you calm your mammaries down, take out the insect repellent and spray like crazy.
This couple in India, however, would do no such things: because they would just pack up and move.
Husband has had enough
According to a report by Mothership SG, the wife has a very insane fear of cockroaches.
So crazy, in fact, the woman has reportedly forced her husband to move houses 18 times in three years!
The report said the woman would scream, on top of her lungs, for help every time she sees a cockroach and she would even refuse to enter the kitchen upon spotting one.
The couple, who got married in 2017, first moved houses in 2018 and within a span of three years, they have done so 17 more times as the woman insisted on shifting to another place whenever a cockroach appears in front of her.
Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go, right?
The woman’s husband has reportedly sought out psychiatric help and he has even brought her to one of India’s best medical institutions called the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for treatment but sadly to no avail.
The woman also refused to take medication for her fear of cockroaches.
As a last resort, the husband, who has no other choice left, is reportedly seeking a divorce from the wife.
Having fear something to that extreme is no fun at all. We hope the couple will find a way to make things work.
Why do we fear roaches?
The fear of cockroaches is known as katsaridaphobia, and the fear can be a debilitating one.The fear can get so bad, a teacher once had to quit her job because she couldn't stand her students saying the word 'cockroach' out loud.
So, why are we so afriad of those creepy crawlies?
Well, according to science, our brain was programmed to fear cockroaches for a wide variety of reasons.
Professor of ecology Jeffrey Lockwood told Time in an interview back in 2016 that many cockroach traits trigger our hardwired disgust reflexes.
Roaches look oily and greasy, Lockwood said, and that triggers our disgust.
And when you kill one, the sound it makes and the smell it emits will also freak some one out.
“Also, if you step on one, there’s the crunch—which is disgusting in own right—and that’s accompanied by a whiff of dirty urinal,” Lockwood told the news portal, adding that cockroaches store uric acid in their bodies, a major component of human urine.
The worst part of it all is that a cockroach can run up to a speed of 5.6km an hour.
Considering that a cockroach can survive a nuclear fallout, they are indeed a scary creature.