Woman's Husband Said She 'Does Nothing Around The House' So She Stopped Cleaning Until He Apologized
The mother of two wanted to show him exactly how much she took care of.
TikTok A woman on TikTok gave her followers a brief look into how labor is divided in her household and went viral for doing so. Lindsey Donnelly is the mom of two children who is building her own social media agency. One of her recent posts received over 11 million views, going viral for just how relatable her content was.
Donnelly’s husband told her she does nothing around the house, so she stopped cleaning for days.
“My husband made a comment that I do nothing around the house, so for two days, I really did nothing around the house,” stated the text overlaid on Donnelly’s TikTok post. She went from room to room, filming what she saw after she stopped doing household chores.
Her kids’ backpacks sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, surrounded by toys and shoes.
Photo: TikTok
There were dirty dishes on the counters and in the sink. There were more dishes on the dining room table and baskets full of laundry in the living room. In the last shot of her post, Donnelly filmed the bathroom, where there were bath toys in the tub, piles of clothes on the floor, and a sink vanity covered with hair products.
Donnelly captioned the post saying, “Then I left town for a girls’ trip,” and used the hashtag #marriagehumor.
Many of the comments beneath her post came from other women, who either praised Donnelly or relayed a similar experience with their own husbands. “You are so real for this,” one woman commented, before thanking Donnelly for the post.
Donnelly returned to TikTok with her husband beside her, explaining that he apologized for insulting her contributions to the household.
In the follow-up post, Donnelly tells her husband about the original TikTok post going viral. She turned to him and said, “You know how you said something to me that made me feel like… you said I didn’t do anything around the house, and I didn’t clean the house, I didn’t do anything for three days, just to show you, and now that you’ve since apologized and all that, well, I made a TikTok video of the mess and the situation, and like, over a million people watched the TikTok.”
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Donnelly was laughing as she spoke and her husband joined in. She then explained that she wanted to tell him about the post’s viral existence because she didn’t want his feelings to be hurt, “because [in] the comments, it’s like, 8000 people [saying] leave him.”
“So, I’m public enemy number one,” her husband responded, smiling wryly.
“I’m doing this video so you have the opportunity to redeem yourself for saying that,” Donnelly laughed even harder.
“Sorry, TikTok,” her husband replied. “He is actually a really good husband,” Donnelly said.
That she defends him as a “really good” partner calls into focus just how low the standards men are held to as partners. In a post from 2022, Donnelly asked her followers, “Is your life more or less laundry?” She panned the camera over five laundry baskets full of unfolded clothes, along with more clothes on the couch, while her husband sat on his phone and flashed her a peace sign.
Photo: TikTok
No one can know the intimate intricacies of anyone else’s marriage, as educator Laura Danger pointed out in her response post to Donnelly’s videos. Yet as Danger sees the situation, “one partner invalidated the work that the other partner puts in… [that partner] then prove their own point by putting down their work for a couple of days, and as you can see, nobody steps in to do that work.”
“The work she was doing was going unnoticed, unappreciated, undervalued… something we can assume, consistent frustration pushed her to actually make a physical example of this. She pulled back her labor and the space she left was not filled.”
“After all of that, she feels the need to defend her partner as a ‘good husband,” Danger stated, then described a good partner as someone who “does not dismiss their partner’s needs.”
Danger made the point of explaining, “If you click the hashtag #marriagehumor, you’re going to see a whole bunch of videos just like this… If the roles were reversed, and she told her partner, ‘You don’t do s–t all day at work,’ it wouldn’t be seen as lighthearted. It would be the insult that it is… it raises the question, ‘What is a good partner?’”
Donnelly made yet another follow-up post, in which she described her husband as an “almost perfect husband… who pays all the bills, takes me on fancy vacations, and lets me be me.”
While it seems clear that Donnelly didn’t expect quite so much attention focused on her domestic life, it’s also apparent that her post gained traction because of just how many women identified with what they saw— an uneven division of labor without any apparent discussion on how to remedy the inequity.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers parenting issues, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.