We’ve all heard about — or maybe even been married to — men who just sort of sit back and let their wives do absolutely everything for them, clueless as to how much work goes into managing their home and life.
But one man online has taken it to a whole new level, and boy oh boy… has it blown up in his face.
The man let his wife handle their divorce — and now his attorney is representing her instead of him.
Divorce is difficult and crushing, so it’s not exactly unexpected that either party might not exactly be on top of the details. Perhaps that’s why Reddit is so chock-full of stories about divorce mishaps that there are entire compendiums out there rounding up some of the most hilarious ones.
But when it comes to this Reddit user? Well… his story, which he posted in the r/legaladvice subReddit, honestly reads like a sitcom plot, and it seems unlikely it will ever be topped.
The man gave his wife his legal insurance information, expecting her to get him a laywer. Instead, she signed with him herself.
The story starts out like so many other scenarios in marriages where the man is just sort of fundamentally clueless —like the classic joke about the guy who doesn’t know where the scissors are in the house he’s lived in for 10 years and depends upon his wife to find them for him. Except on steroids.
The man wrote that he gets legal insurance benefits from his work, so he gave his wife all the information so that she could contact an attorney on his behalf. Which is… well, presumptuous on a level that’s pretty mind-boggling. “Hi darling, could you please go purchase the knife for me to shiv you with?” In what world?!
So imagine his surprise when he found she’d done… well, what pretty much anyone with any sense would do.
“I was under the impression that [the attorneys] were working for me when drawing up the documents because it was my insurance paying them,” he writes in his post.
But surprise! “I just found out that she was the one to sign the contract with the attorney, but it was my insurance money that was used to pay them.” And when he checked with the attorneys they confirmed that they were indeed Team Soon-To-Be Ex-Wife. Perhaps best of all, he realized all this on the Friday night before his Monday morning court appearance. Oops!
Many people online saw the mishap as the perfect example of why women are most often the ones to initiate a divorce.
“Even in divorces dudes expect their ‘wives’ to do everything,” one woman on Twitter remarked about this absurd story. In the United States, it is well known that women are the ones to file for divorce in the vast majority of cases, with some estimates putting the figure as high as 70%.
And when it comes to the reasons for splitting up, “dudes expecting their wives to do everything” is, at least nowadays, right up near the top of the list. It’s not a coincidence we hear so many stories nowadays of burned-out women losing their patience with their male partner’s lack of help around the house or with the kids, and that terms like “weaponized incompetence” and “married single mom” have become such buzzphrases.
Many divorce lawyers and therapists online say that anecdotally, women who are simply fed up with these dynamics are the number one reason they are so overloaded with divorce cases that family law firms are struggling to hire enough lawyers to deal with the backlog.
But even without all that context, this guy’s obliviousness would still be… pretty astonishing — and that’s how it struck pretty much everyone online. One Reddit commenter put it perfectly: “You thought your soon-to-be ex-wife would handle the logistics of your attorney in your divorce? What?”
There really isn’t much more to say than that, is there?
In the end, the man updated his post to share that he’d spoken with the lawyer and, due to the insurance being in his name, they will be withdrawing themselves from the case and refunding his money.
He also said that he and his wife are divorcing amicably and remaining close friends, despite what appears to have been a farcical marriage. Hey, at least they’ll be able to laugh about this for years to come — along with the rest of us.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
