Reddit Is Rallying Behind A Woman Who Ended Her 25-Year Marriage After Her Husband Ate Her Last Slice Of Cheesecake
By Erin Whitten
A woman has shared a sad story of how she split from her husband of 25 years after he ate her cheesecake. The revelation has the internet split between two very heated camps. Was this petty of her? Or was it the most relatable story they’d ever read?
In her post, the wife writes that she and her husband, now 46 and 48 years old, had been having a tough time for months. Sleeping in separate bedrooms, she was waiting for them to fight or talk, anything. She was holding out hope that maybe their 25th anniversary would help them reset and rekindle. He ended up surprising her by planning a trip. A destination they’d been many times before, Shenandoah Valley. Not exactly exciting, but hey, if this is what it takes to move forward, she thought, I’ll go with it. They stayed in a nice enough hotel the first night, and the drive was beautiful, but he was distant the whole time.
“He held my hand a few times, but when I put my hand in to hold his, he would pull away,” she wrote. By the next evening they were in a different hotel, one she reminded him they’d promised never to return to. He said it was a mistake, there weren’t many rooms left this time of year. She didn’t press it and just ordered dinner instead. It was quiet but nice. He let her pick the restaurant and order what she wanted.
She ordered a banana cheesecake to go, as did he. Back at the hotel, she took a bite of hers, proclaimed it too rich, and wrapped the rest for the next morning. He ate his whole slice, and they had a perfunctory, tired round of sex before turning in.
Not the best anniversary, but hey, at least she had her cheesecake to look forward to in the morning, right? When she woke up, poured herself a cup of coffee, and cracked open the fridge door, she “felt something in me break.” The slice was gone. All that was left was an empty box. And another box with one tiny bite still in it. “He said, ‘It’s right there,’ with a chuckle,” she wrote. “When I went off on him, he said, ‘I got hungry last night and ate the other one, but the one we started last night is still there.’”
It was a few bites at most, not even one complete bite. But for her, that one bite was the last straw. “My heart sank. I was done pretending I’m OK with crumbs,” she wrote. The lone bite, which he had clearly not finished but simply saved for later, became a metaphor for the marriage, for twenty-five years of giving, of managing, of organizing, and taking care and being left with crumbs at the end.
“After 25 years of caring for this man, being his maid, mother, and sex object. Raising HIS kids, taking care of HIS home, HIS finances, making HIS freaking doctor’s appointments, and I can’t even have my freaking anniversary cake,” she wrote. “Like everything in our life, I do all the heavy lifting and get what’s left. I was DONE.” So she told him she was done. “I deserve someone who not only will not eat my cake but will protect it and keep anyone from eating my cake,” she wrote. “And I am done being grateful for crumbs.”
Responses to her story are predictably all over the place. Some say the cake was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, it was never really about the cake. Other people say she explicitly told him she didn’t want it so it’s really not his fault. One wrote, “You’re divorced because of 25 years of pent-up resentment, the cake really had nothing to do with it.” Another: “The fact he found it funny he ate your cake is worse than eating the cake, to be honest.”
Others chimed in with their own stories, partners who had similar breakdowns over something similar over the years. One commenter summed up a lot of people’s thoughts: “It’s not about the cake. It’s about all the times she asked him to meet her at some basic level of love and support, and he didn’t.”
So, what do you think? Is she justified in splitting from her husband over this one act of carelessness? Or did she make a mountain out of a molehill and use it as an excuse to call it quits? Maybe that’s the point. It’s never about the cake. It’s everything that came before, and one little piece can push you over the edge.
