Wife Sends Herself Roses To Catch Her Husband Once Again Forgetting Her Birthday
He later said he was just playing along because he'd planned a surprise, but few were convinced.
shironosov / Getty Images / Canva Pro At this point, a husband forgetting his wife's birthday is a cultural cliché. How many sitcom episodes have there been over the decades about some doofus farcically trying to cover his tracks?
But forgetting your wife's birthday once is bad enough. Doing it multiple times? Well, at that point, it's a choice, right? And when it happened to one wife on TikTok, she decided to teach her husband a lesson.
She caught her husband forgetting her birthday by sending herself flowers.
When both her husband and her kids once again forgot her birthday, fitness and nutrition influencer Tara Woodcox decided to teach him a lesson once and for all.
The video of her trick went wildly viral back in 2022 and has resurfaced in recent weeks.
To call him out, Woodcox had a friend send her roses with a card that said "I love you," then said "thank you for the roses, I liked 'em" to her husband after they were delivered.
Her husband's response was instantly telling. He froze in confusion and said he didn't send them. "The card said I love you," Woodcox replied, but her husband didn't catch on and suggested one of her friends must have sent them.
"Uh, no one does that," Woodcox wrote in on-screen text. A dozen roses with a card that says "I love you" is an awfully romantic gift for two friends to send to each other, after all!
It was the second year in a row he forgot, and when he realized it he tried to play it off.
Woodcox tried to give her husband a way to bail himself out. "Did you ask someone to [send them]?" she asked. "Uhhhh, not that I remember," he responded. Come on, dude.
Finally, it dawned on him, and he said, "I didn't forget your birthday; I got you something way cooler than that." Woodcox responded in onscreen text, "aka he is about to go back to town to find something."
"He forgot my birthday last year too," she went on to say in text titles, describing a situation that is all too familiar to all too many wives and moms.
"As a mom, we put together a dinner and bake the cake," she wrote. "When it's my birthday I'm always curious if he will take that initiative." Looks like a hard no.
Woodcox seemed to have posted her video for a laugh, but not many women saw the humor. "If he wanted to he would, don’t settle for this," one wrote. "I would simply 'forget' our marriage," another quipped.
And one woman pointed out the elephant in the room. "I’m sure he’s a great husband," she wrote, "but really, with today’s technology, how can you forget your wife’s bday?"
Woodcox later said her husband was just playing along because he'd planned a surprise, but many thought she was making excuses.
"He's not the type to give gifts, he's never been," Woodcox said of her husband in a follow-up video. "[But] he did have a surprise for me."
She then detailed that he'd planned a dinner and a trip to an escape room (how romantic, just what every woman wants on her birthday…). "He just didn't want to tell me because it was a surprise," she added, "so he was acting like he didn't know."
"So if you've ever read the 'Five Love Languages,'" she went on to say, referencing the wildly popular book by Gary Chapman that has been widely debunked by mental health professionals, "he is 'Acts of Service' 100%."
"He thought the surprise, like, was supposed to be kept a surprise, I guess. I don't know," she then said. "But he is a really great husband; he's a really great dad, he's super awesome. He just is not a gift person."
People were not convinced, however. "From my experience, this would be me just making excuses for him because now that I aired him, I feel guilty," one woman wrote. "We all tell ourselves what we have to," another added.
Others pointed out that he could have at least said "Happy birthday" without ruining his surprise and found it incriminating that he didn't.
"The 5 Love Languages" is disturbingly problematic and Chapman has no qualifications whatsoever, but even his cockamamie book says that the point of learning said languages is so that you can learn how to be the best partner possible. That means doing what you have to do to remember your wife's birthday even though it doesn't come naturally to you. That's… literally what the book is about.
Nobody knows the truth of anyone's marriage but the two people in it, but the incongruence between Woodcox's two videos certainly feels familiar to anyone who's been in a relationship like this or helped someone deal with one.
As one recent viewer put it, "How many years are we going to allow this?"
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.