Lindsay Donnelly’s TikTok was supposed to be relatable. Last summer, she’d had a squabble with her husband that any partner, family member, or roommate knows all too well: He felt like he was doing all the housework, and she wasn’t doing any of it. So she decided to prove otherwise.
For two days, Donnelly did nothing. Then she posted the evidence of what a two-parent, two-kid household looks like when the mother refuses to clean up — laundry unfolded, toys on the floor, dirty dishes on the counter — set to Taylor Swift’s “Karma.” Within a day, her video had a million views, many from women who found it funny or felt seen. “Overwhelmingly, it was a lot of, ‘You go queen!’” Donnelly says. And then there were the others.
This story first appeared in The Highlight.
A year and 20 million views later, nearly all of the most-liked comments on Donnelly’s video are people telling her to divorce her husband. “I’d get divorce papers honestly. That’s unacceptable that he can’t pick up as well,” wrote one. “Don’t let your husband stop you from finding your soulmate, honey,” said another. Many women related to it, but not in the way Donnelly intended: “This same thing happened to me. Filed for divorce yesterday.”
“Having people comment on my relationship and say something like ‘get divorced,’ — I felt unhappy about it,” says Donnelly, the founder of the social media management firm Authentic Community Marketing, adding that she’s still happily married. “It can feel disproportionately painful, because even though a hundred people tell you you’re beautiful, you’re gonna hear the one person that tells you you’ve got spinach in your teeth.”
Perhaps nobody said it better than Britney Spears, who famously wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “DUMP HIM” in 2002 after her breakup with Justin Timberlake. Two decades on, echoes of the sentiment have become the internet’s go-to piece of advice for women in heterosexual relationships. On any TikTok or Instagram Reel posted by a woman that includes a male partner who looks anything less than ecstatic to be there, the comments are typically flooded with some variation of “divorce him” or a string of red flag emojis.
The comments can veer into the extreme: When a woman posted her husband’s lackluster reaction to her new hair, one viewer said her husband reminded her of Chris Watts, the Colorado man who murdered his entire family.
Messy and mean-spirited internet comments sections are nothing new, of course: Joseph Reagle, an associate professor of communications at Northeastern University and author of Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web, uses the metaphor of the “rotten barrel.” It refers to the effects an environment can have on people’s behavior, as opposed to the effect a single bad person (the proverbial rotten apple) can have on the bunch. Particularly nasty comment sections, he says, can feel liberating for those participating in them, and the gossipy nature of judging other people’s relationships satisfies an urge to create narratives. “People love a mystery,” says Reagle. “They love making predictions and seeing what might come of them.”
This overall ethos of “divorce him” might have more to do with the fraught relations between the sexes at the moment, both online and off. There’s a growing sense that men and women are drifting away from one another, politically and culturally. Women have become more progressive in recent years, and in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, they’ve doubled down on their support of abortion rights; some men (and some women, too), meanwhile, are preaching the return of regressive gender roles amid a backlash to Me Too. “I’ll take the bear” is a sentiment you’re likely to see in the comments of videos on social media, referring to the question of whether a woman would rather be left alone in the woods with a bear or a man.
Hence, divorce advice is everywhere. For decades, feminists have extolled the virtues of breaking up while criticizing the systemic control of women through marriage. Now that fewer people are marrying, and those who do are marrying later, there’s less emphasis on monogamous romance in general and a wider acceptance and interest in nonmonogamy, platonic partnerships, and “decentering” men.
Influencers like Florence Given have turned “Dump him!” into Instagram-ready T-shirts and art prints; earlier this year, journalist Lyz Lenz released This American Ex-Wife, which tells the story of her own divorce and the societal history of how marriage benefits men on the backs of women’s unpaid labor.
The blanket advice for women to ditch men entirely has not been without its own criticism. “‘Dump Him’ Feminism Isn’t Revolutionary. It’s Callous,” wrote the leftist journalist Ash Sarkar in 2022. “The recognition that the weight of emotional baggage is unevenly distributed has, amongst some contemporary feminists, morphed into the idea that any sense of obligation is itself the enemy,” she wrote.
Yet it’s caused some women to turn to social media to see whether they should, in fact, dump him. Over the past year, trends that supposedly determine whether your relationship is solid or not have proliferated on TikTok and Reels. One of the most popular is the “orange peel test,” wherein you hand your partner an orange and ask them to peel it for you. If they do so without question, they’re a keeper. If they ask something to the effect of, “Why can’t you peel it yourself?” — run.
There are dozens more, including the “bird test” (point out something tiny, like a bird, and see if they respond enthusiastically), the “Beckham test” (start dancing to a song and see if they join you), and “name a woman,” in which you ask them to name a woman and hope they say you.
As psychologist and author Alexandra Solomon told my coworker Alex Abad-Santos about the orange peel “theory,” “An entire intimate relationship can’t be boiled down to what a partner does or doesn’t do with an orange,” adding that, “The worry that I have is that I prefer us to talk directly to our partners about our needs rather than setting up a test. And certainly, rather than setting up a test that goes public, because I think the risk here is humiliation.”
Humiliation is what awaits many who post videos about their relationships, often coming in ways they never could have possibly expected. Any evidence of bad relationship behavior — even by normal, non-famous people — can lead to a manhunt online. In June, a woman took multiple videos of a man wearing a wedding ring and allegedly flirting and making out with the woman sitting next to him on a plane. She then posted them, writing, “Do your thing TikTok.” In a day, commenters had found the man and his family, posting photos from their social media profiles and praising the original poster for being a “girl’s girl” by apparently rescuing the woman from her cheating husband.
Not everyone was impressed: TikToker Tamika Turner made a video saying, “Your addiction to surveillance and attention is betraying the fact that although you’re the exact demographic to call yourself ‘girl’s girls,’ your only allegiance is to your own entertainment,” pointing out the enormous personal ramifications a video like this could have on someone who never asked for the public’s attention.
The hunger for clear-cut pronouncements on other people’s marriages and relationships is so insatiable that Dustin Poynter earns his living by making them. Also known as “the red flag guy,” Poynter has spent the last year reposting videos of couples in relationships on TikTok and Instagram and splices them with videos of himself holding (or sometimes running with) a giant red or green flag. A green flag communicates that the partners are behaving well, like surprising their significant other with a gift, while a red flag portends doom (like, say, when a partner acts like a maniac during a gender reveal). The Arkansas-based 32-year-old has more than 4 million followers and earns a lucrative income through regular brand deals (he declined to disclose exactly how much, but says, “It’s changed my life, and I’m able to support my whole family”).
With Poynter having sifted through many, many TikTok videos posted by couples hoping to go viral, I wondered about the vast majority of instances where people’s behaviors can’t be boiled down to a single color. What of the “beige flags,” as they’re called online, the kinds that don’t really fit into the categories of “good” or “bad”? “I think red flags are not permanent,” Poynter says. “It requires the person to acknowledge it and want to change, but I do believe that people can change. I’m not out here trying to break anybody up.”
Boyfriend won’t cut up your fruit? Break up! Husband says you don’t do enough housework? Divorce him, sis!
Poynter stresses that he’s not an expert; he’s just a normal guy running with a flag through a public park who stumbled upon a bizarre niche that allows him to live the life he’s always dreamed. But his — which is to say, the entire internet’s — brand of advice-giving and morality policing is remarkably black-and-white. This, obviously, is the reason why TikTok trends and phenomena like Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” forum are so popular. They allow us to fit complex situations into neat and comfortable boxes. Boyfriend won’t cut up your fruit? Break up! Husband says you don’t do enough housework? Divorce him, sis!
Taken together, the comments feel almost like the next wave of girlboss or Lean In feminism, where instead of acting more like men in professional settings, women are viewing men as a hopeless cause, treating them the way patriarchy has treated women for eternity. While the practice of “decentering” men from one’s life can be hugely positive for many women, the idea that all men are trash is loaded with essentialist rhetoric that harms people of all genders. Similarly, the idea that all heterosexual marriages are (or should be) irrevocably doomed is, as the Atlantic’s Lily Meyer pointed out, a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine a better world in which two people who ostensibly love each other can create an equal and mutually positive relationship.
Expecting nuance from a TikTok comment (character limit: 150) is a futile exercise. Perhaps the world would be a simpler place if the future could be determined by a test that goes viral on social media — if you could truly determine whether you should marry a man by bringing him an orange and waiting, hopefully, for him to peel it. Marriage doesn’t work like that, though. Because if it did, nobody would ever have to get divorced in the first place.
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