Woman Says A Simple Gesture & A Green Apple Made Her Realize She'd Been Treated Wrong In Her Prior Relationships
Green apples are the newest green flag.
TikTok For all of the “icks” and “red flags” that people can come up with in relationships and dating, there are those rare green flags that appear that will make you rethink all of the relationships you had in your past — and for one woman, the green flag had to do with a green apple.
Laura Clery made a stitch for a TikTok that asked what was one thing a man had done that made her realize she had been accepting too little from her relationships, and that one thing was being given a green apple in the middle of the night.
The man she was dating bought her a green apple in the middle of the night.
“Okay, so I have this weird quirk,” Clery explained. “Ever since I was a little girl, very little, I would wake up in the middle of the night, like two or three, sometimes four in the morning, to go downstairs to the kitchen and get a green apple.”
“I would eat that apple half-asleep and then go back to bed.”
She said that this was something she had been doing ever since she could remember — from six or seven years old to now, in her thirties. She then got into explaining how telling her now-husband about this quirk had played out 10 years ago when they had first started dating.
“We were probably on our fourth date,” she explains of her husband, Stephen, “and I had told him about this quirk of mine. He thought it was funny and cute or whatever.” When he invited her back to his apartment, she made it clear that he’d better not “try anything funny,” as they hadn’t slept together yet and she wanted to take things slowly with him.
When she started to get tired after they watched “some European indie film,” he suggested she should just sleep over. She agreed, but once again warned him against trying anything funny while they slept in the same bed together, and he was a gentleman about it, saying “of course not” and reassuring her that he wouldn’t.
When she woke up in the middle of the night, Stephen wasn’t in bed with her.
“I wake up around like maybe three in the morning and I turn and he’s not there, and I thought that was really weird, like ‘Where is he?’” she wondered but eventually went back to sleep. “I wake up again around like, four, and there’s a green apple next to my bedside. I grabbed it and I eat it and he’s sleeping next to me.”
The next morning, they talked about what happened in the middle of the night and where he went, and his explanation was the moment that changed everything for her.
“He tells me that he woke up at like two or three in the morning and he realized that he didn’t have any apples, and so he wanted to make sure when I woke up in the middle of the night that I had my apple,” Clery explains, tears choking her up as she tried to continue explaining.
He had gone out around two in the morning in search of a green apple for her to eat in the middle of the night and had to visit many different stores before finding one at the third gas station he went to. He bought her a green apple, and “10 years later, we’re still together.”
The original clip from Clery is around a year old, posted in the Spring of 2022, but recently went viral again after Stephen Hilton, the man she married made a stitch of it.
Laura Clery and Stephen Hilton announced their separation on August 28, 2022.
Hilton announced that they had separated in a video posted to his YouTube channel, while Clery announced it four days later.
He didn’t say much in the new stitch but reacted alongside his ex-wife’s telling of the story. He captioned the video “A nice story from the old days…”
His TikTok has been filled with videos about how they have both been recovering through their separation and recovering from substance abuse addictions. They co-parent their two children, Poppy and Alfie, and can sometimes be seen together in a TikTok as they maneuver around this strange time in their lives.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.