Woman Kicks Her Husband Out Because Of The Way He Cleans Their Shower & Nearly Everyone Is On Her Side
It's a classic case of weaponized incompetence — but with something so, so much worse on top of it all.
Barillo_Picture / Shutterstock At this point, it's a tale as old as time — a couple ends up in conflict because the male partner fails to help his wife or girlfriend around the house.
But one woman on Reddit found herself dealing with this situation on a whole other level — one that is so gross it's brought them to a breaking point.
The woman kicked her husband out after discovering the disgusting way he had been cleaning their shower.
Weaponized incompetence has become a buzzword phrase for an all too common dynamic in heterosexual partnerships in which men feign or exaggerate a lack of knowledge about household or child-rearing tasks in order to avoid certain responsibilities.
This dynamic will be instantly relatable to countless women in relationships — and this woman, who shared her story in a post on Reddit, is among them.
She and her husband were breaking under the workload that their jobs, studies, and children had created. But whenever she asked her husband for help or followed up on a previous request, he either said he didn't know how to do what she was asking or didn't remember her ever explaining it.
"I know that is a huge red flag for weaponized incompetence," she wrote, "but he says that his therapist tells him that it isn’t malicious but that he’s just 'burnt out' and dissociating." Even if that was the case, what ended up happening between them is pretty shocking.
After she 'blew up' at him for not helping, he said he'd been cleaning their shower regularly without her realizing it.
Things came to a head on a recent night when she finally couldn't keep her feelings to herself any longer. "I laid into him about our marriage/relationship/household workload. I told him that I felt isolated and lonely," she said.
She shared that one of the reasons she feels this way is because of him not pulling his weight around the house. "He only does things part of the way which inevitably causes me to do twice the amount of work," she said.
His response surprised her. "He countered back saying that he 'cleans the shower almost every day.' This shocked me as I’ve never heard him use our power scrubber and our hand scrubber is still in the packaging."
The woman kicked her husband out when she found out he'd been cleaning the bathroom with the washcloths she uses in the shower.
When she accused him of lying about cleaning the shower, he defended himself by saying, "I’ve been using your washcloths to clean the shower," the very washcloths she uses "every day on my face and every other part of my body."
Aside from being disgusting in the first place, she was even more furious because she'd been having major skin problems — problems exacerbated by him using her washcloths to clean the shower.
"I definitely lost it and was crying/screaming at him and told him to leave the house," she wrote. He thinks she's "completely overreacting," calling it an honest mistake and he just didn't think about what a problem it was before he did it, especially since he doesn't even put cleaning products on the washcloths — which is another problem in and of itself.
But even as much as she understands that his demanding career in medicine has completely fried his brain she can't get past it. "I empathize so much with how burnt out we BOTH are so part of me does want to believe he is just tired," she said, "but I feel so angry right now."
People on social media had far less patience for her husband than she did and saw the situation as part of a wider trend in male-female relationships.
An unequal division of household and parental labor is an increasing problem in heterosexual partnerships, even as such relationships become more egalitarian in other ways.
A 2020 study by Gallup found that such relationships tend to divide household work among traditionally gendered lines by substantial margins, with women handling the majority of cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing and men handling things like car maintenance and yard work.
And women have the rates of burnout to prove it. A 2022 study found that 66 percent of working parents are crumbling under the weight of their workloads, but women are feeling this way far more than men are — 68 percent of women say they're burned out compared to 42 percent of men.
But many felt that this woman's situation went far beyond just the usual doofus-husband antics or even weaponized incompetence, and might have even been an act of covert aggression.
"So his defense of not pulling enough weight is that he cleans the shower every day without using proper supplies or really cleaning it at all... With items he knows are yours/you use?" one incredulous commenter wrote.
"An adult man should have enough brain cells to know 1) those go on your FACE and 2) things don’t get 'clean' from one or two swipes from one dry washcloth," another person added.
Whatever the case, it's hard not to understand why the woman kicked her husband out. Here's hoping they can work their way through this — and maybe her husband can Google the proper way to clean a shower.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.