Woman Criticized For Gushing Over The Kind Note Her Husband Left After Making A Mess In The Kitchen
Miljan Zivkovic / Shutterstock Arguments over housework are so common among married couples that they should probably be added to traditional wedding vows. In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, when you've destroyed my kitchen and won't clean it up.
For one woman on TikTok, her husband's way of handling this left her swooning, but others felt like she was cutting him way too much slack. Maybe instead of writing the note, he could have actually tidied a bit.
The woman sparked controversy for gushing over the note her husband left when he made a mess in the kitchen.
The division of household labor in married couples has become a hot-button topic in recent years, as so-called "weaponized incompetence" has become a buzzword. From the sounds of it, TikTok user Susan was once among the myriad wives at their wits' end with their husbands seemingly having no care or concern for the work it takes to manage a household.
"We've come so far," she said in a recent video after seeing the way her husband handled a mess he'd made. After leaving a sinkful of dirty dishes, he wrote her a note saying, 'I got it.'
"My husband had people over for like a big game last night," Susan said in her video, filmed in the early morning after. Shen then showed her kitchen sink teeming with dirty pans and utensils before exclaiming, "Look at all these freaking dishes in the sink!"
For many wives, this is an instantly familiar scenario: he has his buddies over and expects her to clean up all the detritus of their get-together. "And then I get this note," Susan said. She then showed a note her husband had taped to the counter, reading, "I got it!" meaning he planned to take care of the dishes later on. "What a good guy," Susan said.
She went on to say how the note made her feel respected and held it up as evidence of how much her husband had changed.
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Susan gushed about how the note made her feel, saying it made her want to do the dishes for him as a thank you. "The thing is, just because he left me the note makes me want to tackle it," she said. "Like I have morning energy, it's fine."
But the acknowledgment that he knew her, seeing the dishes in the morning, would cause her stress and maybe even hurt meant a lot to her. "I just love that. He acknowledges that he left a mess in the sink and, like, don't worry… he'll take responsibility for it," she said, adding "We've come so far."
Many on TikTok were similarly bowled over by the gesture. "The notes go a LONG way with us wives," one woman wrote. "I love this," another added. "Like he was tired and didn’t want to do it, but knows you shouldn’t have to. What ace communication and all it took was a Post-It."
But others found the note ridiculous and indicative of how men are so often applauded for basic courtesy.
"Bare minimum," one commenter tersely wrote. "[For real]," another added, "I'd rather die alone." Others sniped, "The bar is on the floor" when it comes to how "good men" are measured.
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It's hard not to draw a comparison, for example, to the ways men are often cheered as good dads and husbands any time they babysit their kids, a concept that is absurd since taking care of your own children is not babysitting, or when they take an active role in parenting.
Should men really be applauded for doing the work their wives and partners do all day, every day, with no thanks at all? Of course not. It's hard even to visualize the tables being turned in this scenario because most women would never leave the mess in the first place due to the expectations placed on them.
But in a follow-up video that Susan filmed with her husband, they revealed that it truly wasn't that deep. He had already cleaned the entire kitchen, and the dishes in the sink were just the few remaining stragglers that didn't fit in the dishwasher. Since it was late, he decided to leave them until the following day and just didn't want Susan to think he expected her to do them.
Ultimately, it came down to him making an effort to clearly communicate in order to avoid the exact sort of entitlement and weaponized incompetence some commenters accused him of. Clearly, it made all the difference, and that's the real lesson of this particular bit of internet back-and-forth.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
