u/FlippyIsKing18

Me (29M) and my fiancée (35F) have lived in a duplex for about 2 years now. Since day 1, we've had problems with the neighbors next door. They're a middle-aged couple who constantly fight, shout, and have guests over in the middle of the night. What's worse is that the husband has a TV set up in the garage that he's usually watching when he's not at work, and he always plays it at high volume. I'm not lying when I say I can hear his TV coming down the road at night when I get home from work, from my car, with the windows up.

Despite that, they are notorious on our block for calling the police about noise coming from anyone else. Kids playing, music, TV playing, etc. They've never outright admitted to doing the calls, but we all know they're the ones doing it. Until now, it hasn't happened to us, but my fiancée and I are very annoyed at their inconsideration. The landlord won't do a thing about it either because he claims they're not doing anything wrong. And to my knowledge, nobody's called the cops on them before for their noise.

A few weeks ago, I was gifted a record player, and I love it! I've even started a vinyl collection. I don't really play it very often because I work 2nd shift and I try not to make a lot of noise at night.

The other day, I was doing spring cleaning (it's a sick, disgusting job, but it's gotta get done), and since it was daytime, I played my record player and turned it up loud because I was using the vacuum. About 40 minutes later, I heard a knock, and 2 cops were at my door. They got a noise complaint. They both looked annoyed at the neighbors wasting their time, so I simply apologized and took the warning to keep it down. They left without a problem.

Later that day, when my fiancée got home and I told her about the situation, she was upset with me for never mentioning that the neighbors make noise AND file noise complaints all the time. I told her that while it's annoying, I didn't want to stoop to their level and make this whole debacle a 'he did this, she did that' story with the police, and it wouldn't be worth the trouble. She kept saying I missed an opportunity to 'even the score' with the neighbors, but eventually, she dropped it.

But then today, while we were hanging out at home, we both could hear the husband's TV coming from the garage. It was so loud, I swear I could hear when the football players tackled each other. My fiancée kept giving me this look, like 'here's your chance,' and she showed me her phone, which showed she had been recording for about a minute, and the neighbor's TV was audible, overlapping our own TV. I told her no, and I wasn't going to call the police over a cold war with the neighbors.

She got mad and went into the bedroom. I went in later to talk to her about it and she blurted out that she was disappointed and I 'failed her as a man'. I asked what that meant, and she said she was obviously bothered by the noise, and I'm not doing anything about it. She was basically insinuating that I either call the cops myself, or go over and scream at the guy to turn his TV down, which judging by their history with calling the cops, I have a feeling they would take that as a threat of violence and call the cops AGAIN.

I really don't want to escalate things further. We're currently apartment shopping, so hopefully we won't have to put up with it any longer. But AITAH for not calling the cops on the neighbors to appease my fiancée?