I have the same issue, but it comes out in different ways, e.g., not asking my landlord to fix stuff.
The dispos-all in this apartment hasn't been working for... at least three years. I mentioned it to the landlord once -- when he was up here to help us deal with a bat that had somehow gotten in through a hole in the wall and was flying around in our bedroom at 4:30am! -- but never mentioned it again.
The thing is, my landlord and his wife are totally nice people -- friendly, we talk to them all the time, they're pretty easygoing and understanding about stuff... so it should be no big deal to ask him to come up and replace the dispos-all, right? Wrong. I (that is, we) just deal with it not working -- which really isn't that big a deal, of course; I mean, if the furnace or the water heater went on the blink, we'd suck it up and ask him to fix them... but all the same, I'm so confrontation-averse that I go for years without asking my landlord to fix something that... he's supposed to fix!
T