Every now and then, my husband jokes about the “magic counter” in our house. Generally he does this after I tell him he’s left crumbs after making lunch. “Don’t worry, sweetie: that’s the magic counter,” he replies with an impish smile. “The crumbs clean themselves up. I don’t know how it works…” In case it wasn’t obvious, the magic is, in fact, me. Of course he apologizes and cleans up the counter, but I appreciate the subtle apology in the joke itself: the acknowledgement that a lot of the jobs I do around the house (as the primary person who does these things) often go unnoticed. And it’s a realization that TikTok creator Shaunie, who posts as @shaunie1988, recently highlighted after her partner accused her of “doing nothing.”
Oh yeah. Buckle up, folks.
According to her bio, Shaunie works as a critical care nurse. In subsequent videos, she explains that she and her partner of 13 years run a farm together, just the two of them. She also, in those videos, explains how stressful that can be because both she and her partner work extraordinarily hard, together, to juggle everything that needs doing in maintaining the life they’ve built together.
Sometimes it gets stressful. And when it gets stressful, harsh things are said and feelings get hurt…
“When your husband says he doesn’t think you do anything all day, what do you do?” she begins. “Because last night, I about rolled him out the back door … so today I did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because I’m going to prove what ‘nothing’ looks like.”
Shaunie goes on to explain to the men out there that just because they don’t notice that things get done doesn’t mean that women don’t do a lot when they’re home. There’s a reason there’s always toilet paper and shampoo and fresh laundry.
“The magical fairy that visits every f-cking day is us,” she says.
She offers an example of an instance when she worked three night shifts in a row and came home to a house that looked like “a bomb went off.”
“I don’t know how an adult man and two cats could destroy a house in two days, but they did,” she marvels. “So when he comes home, the whole mess that he makes we cleaned up, but he didn’t think I did anything all day.”
Shaunie’s is a relatively small TikTok account — 5500 followers — but this video has garnered 2.6 million views as of press time and more than a quarter of a million likes. Nearly 8,000 commenters have chimed in, largely either aghast or urging her to get out of the relationship.
In follow-up videos, including several where she documents the couple’s “silent standoff,” she pushes back against the idea that her relationship is uniformly miserable and that her partner is a bad man. But the frustration she felt in this initial video about all her invisible labor was very heartfelt and, clearly, something all too many women could relate to.
