Man Gets Dragged For Saying His Wife's Reasons For Divorcing Him Are Just 'Jokes On Sitcoms' — 'It's Weaponized Incompetence, We Are Tired'
He does realize sitcoms aren't real life... right?
Kameleon007, AnaBGD / Getty Images, Billion Photos, Pexels via Canva A man on Reddit is getting quite a talking-to after saying he's upset that his wife is divorcing him for things TV husbands get away with all the time.
You can probably imagine how well that has gone over with people on the internet, particularly women who are fed up with what has become quite a buzzphrase online lately: weaponized incompetence.
It's the practice of pretending not to know how to do anything at home or at work so that you... well, don't have to do anything at home or at work.
Of course, it's one thing to slack off at work by feigning or weaponizing incompetence, but it's a whole other story when you're doing it in your marriage. However, this guy doesn't seem to get what the problem is.
The man is 'upset' that his wife's reasons for divorcing him are 'just jokes' when they happen on sitcoms.
The trope of the bumbling husband has been central to sitcoms for as long as they've existed, and as social media has taken over much of the space entertainment used to, the dopey layabout hubby has become a character online, too.
Because of that, this man thinks it's wildly unfair that his wife left him for basically being Kevin James on "King of Queens."
"Like did I just get a bad [wife] or what?" the man asked in his post titled, "Does anyone else get upset because what ended your marriage you see as fine in a lot of other marriages and on tv?" which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been deleted.
Photo: @ask_aubry / Twitter
"The things that annoyed my wife about me not realizing what needs to be done...not being super social...being content with life and not being super ambitious," he wrote, "all these things I see in other people’s marriages AND I see as jokes on social media or sitcoms."
He went on to describe "the stereotypical guy who doesn’t load the dishwasher right, or who has to ask where the scissors are in a house they’ve lived in for years... society keeps showing me that these things are normal and so common that everyone can relate and joke about them, BUT it is what ended my marriage."
The man went on to blame TV and social media for normalizing incompetence because he was blindsided by his wife's reasons for divorcing him.
"I guess it just pisses me off that these things are either OK with most people and I just happened to end up with someone who it wasn’t [okay with] or that these kinds of stereotypes are still being promoted on social media and sitcoms," he wrote. "They aren’t doing anyone any favors."
Photo: @ask_aubry / Twitter
He went on to say that he was totally surprised by his wife divorcing him. "I honestly didn’t realize any of that stuff was a problem before it was too late. I just thought that's how the man/woman dynamic worked in a relationship," he wrote.
It's left him wondering if his wife is just particularly cranky and unaccepting of the dynamics of "most marriages," or if he'd been duped by the TV husband. "Is the entertainment industry doing us men a disservice?" he asked.
People online were shocked by how oblivious the man was and chalked his divorce up to yet another example of weaponized incompetence.
Of course, the most fundamental problem with this man's take on his divorce is the most obvious. As one commenter on Reddit put it, "sitcoms aren’t real life... they aren’t documentaries."
But this man's story is also part of a wider issue of buzzphrases like "weaponized incompetence" and "married single moms" —women who are in nominally equal partnerships who end up doing all the work themselves. And, more and more, these women seem to have absolutely had enough.
Anecdotally, lawyers and marriage therapists online have reported a surging caseload of divorces exactly like this man's — situations where women are fed up with their husbands not pulling their weight at home, in the relationship, with their kids, and, in some cases, financially, and have decided to simply leave the marriage rather than put up with it any longer.
The scientific community has actually studied the phenomenon of burnout among wives and mothers and have gotten staggering results. A 2022 Ohio State University study found that 66% of parents overall feel totally burned out — but where 68% of moms feels overwhelmed, only 42% of dads do, showing just how unequal the burden is in many households.
Photo: Reddit
As several people began combing through this man's old (and since deleted) Reddit posts, his wife's reasons for divorcing him became crystal clear — and they have nothing to do with sitcoms pushing inaccurate images of marriage on an unsuspecting public.
Hopefully, this man and others like him can learn from his experience, because it sounds like more and more women have truly had enough.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.