“You’re Too Nice” — Woman Admits to Hiding Husband’s Shoe After He Kept Leaving It Out
"I’ve launched them outside in the winter. That’s what 35 years looks like."
Published May 13 2024, 4:25 p.m. ET
A woman who has been with her husband for 30 years revealed how she got revenge on the man for constantly leaving his shoes out in the middle of the floor, causing her to trip over them throughout the day.
Sarah (@sarahmorganp) uploaded her confession in a viral TikTok that sparked disparate reactions from users on the app.
While some folks found her ire over her husband's forgetfulness worthy of divorce, others seemed to just shake their head and say, "Ahh the joys of marriage," with a smile on their face.
"I'm about to go to bed but I just have a confession to make, quick, 'cause I'm feeling guilty. I tripped over my husband's shoes for like the 15th time today," she says, intoning just how upset she was to constantly make this error throughout the day.
An error that she attributed to his carelessness in where he places his shoes: "That he leaves directly in the middle of the walkway when you come in. And I've repeatedly asked him not to leave them there."
But as anyone who's ever lived with another person knows: Old habits die hard. So instead of constantly tripping over the shoes and presumably building up enough resentment until the two of them got embroiled in a heated argument over a lack of consideration on her partner's part, Sarah decided to do something about it.
"So I hid one of his shoes," she admits to her viewers. And it's not like he's probably going to just go and reach for another pair of footwear either, as she reveals:
"They're the only shoes he wears. That's all," she says at the end of the clip.
The Australian-based housing website Domain explored the phenomenon of how "messy homes lead to break-ups" in an article highlighting the case of "writer and mother Stacey Freeman" who believes that "fighting about household tidiness played a key role in why her ex-husband walked out of their marriage."
Freeman went on to be quoted as saying in the article: "I was organized beyond organized. My then-husband, not so much. I began to resent picking up after him, and he began to resent me complaining about it and constantly picking up after him, as though he was a child. The cycle put pressure on an already troubled marriage."
His propensity for leaving lights on whenever he would leave a room, or stacks of papers on tables / his desk, and plastic cups of Diet Coke seem to have gotten on her nerves.
But Freeman wasn't alone with her household disputes. The US Department of Education said that "household chores were the top reason for arguments among couples with kids" after surveying 19,000 families.
Domain even referenced research by Swedish analysts that stated women who thought they were engaging in more household chores than their male counterparts were quicker to quit a relationship than those who believe household cleaning duties were equitably divided.
The article says, "Recently, Swedish researchers explored the issue in a study published in Sociology. They found women who felt they were doing more housework than their partner more likely to break up with them than those enjoying a more equitable division of housework."
HuffPost UK penned its own piece about this phenomenon titled: "Why Couples Break up Over Dirty Dishes" which included a personal anecdote from an author who discussed their own relationship squabbles rooted in household chores.
Like any great piece of drama written about an argument over a seemingly inconsequential thing, the author of the HuffPost piece did point out that her and her former significant other's decision to leave each other really didn't have to do with whether or not one of them was doing chores and the other wasn't.
Ultimately, it had to do with the fact that they didn't really love each other enough to work through the passive-aggressiveness they chose to use in communicating with one another rather than more constructive dialogues. "I didn't leave him over a pasta shell. I left because our argument was characteristic of how we operated together," she wrote.
The author continued: "Two people who were seemingly unable to conduct a relationship without falling into manipulative passive-aggressive communication strategies. We had been indoctrinated into suppressing the expression of our emotions and eventually the emotions themselves. Our suppressed anger turned our respect to scorn. And our love to hatred."
Some people who responded to Sarah's video seemed to feel very strongly about her husband's choice to leave his shoes out in the middle of the floor, like one individual who thought it was grounds for throwing him in the garbage, despite the fact that Sarah wrote in a caption they were together for 30 years: "Throw them away then throw the husband away."
This was a sentiment echoed by someone else who said, "I would say divorce him. If he cares that little about you that he’s not willing to pick up his shoes you’re in for a hard road."
But there was another user on the app who said that they had the same problem and didn't seem to be as bothered by shoes being forgotten in the middle of the house: "I’ve launched them outside in the winter. That’s what 35 years looks like."