‘My ex husband also taught me how to be single’: Woman asks her man to build a retaining wall. Then she does it herself. Now people think she should leave him

Couples content is extremely popular on TikTok. However, posting about your relationship comes with one possible drawback: the risk of virality resulting in thousands of strangers weighing in on your love life.

One woman is currently experiencing this phenomenon after she documented herself doing some manual labor. In a viral TikTok video, she revealed that her partner didn't pull through to help with a renovation, leading commenters to say she should divorce him.

Why did she build the retaining wall alone?

DIY-er and nurse Krys (@kryskurls) posted a video about a construction project she'd asked “[her] man” to do. She revealed, however, that she was doing the project herself. The video has more than 4.7 million views.

“Welcome to my new series of the [expletive] that I asked my man to do, but it took him too long,” Krys said. “So I'mma do it.”

Krys said she had bought retaining wall bricks “over a year ago.” She panned her camera to show the bricks stacked onto a pile. She added that since the bricks had been sitting in her driveway, she might as well handle the chore herself.

Krys then walked her viewers through the steps she'd need to take to get the job done.

“Step one, um, level the floor, I think,” she said. “And then put a base down, put the bricks down. Easy enough. Let's get to it.”

The video then cut to Krys crouching in front of her home, next to the visibly leveled ground for the retaining wall.

“Step one done, kind of,” she said. “It was harder than I thought it was. Definitely uneven, it's on a slope.”

Krys showed her viewers the extra work she'd put in to account for that slope, panning the camera down her freshly laid handiwork. She created multiple levels and individually leveled each section.

“It was a little harder than I thought,” Krys said. “It took me two hours to do that part. I bought some adhesive. I'm gonna put that down. I'm gonna lay the next row and hope it's still level. Let's find out.”

The verdict? Krys laid down “row two,” and then filmed a shot of a horizontal level. The bubble sat perfectly in the middle, indicating that the row was indeed level.

By the next day, Krys had successfully completed her project all by herself.

“I think it took me like four hours in total to do it,” she said, showing off the final product. “Not bad, There's some slight imperfections but, I mean, I'm not a professional. And I don't know, that looks pretty good to me.”

How did commenters react?

Krys's viewers heaped praise upon her in her comment section, with construction professionals even weighing in to compliment her work.

“Girl, you absolutely destroyed that that was absolutely fantastic,” commented one viewer. “I am a contractor and I would hire you on the spot to be on my team.”

“4 hours?! Get it girl,” wrote another. “You're a beast!”

But many viewers were more concerned with directing their ire toward Krys's offscreen partner. Multiple commenters separately mentioned variations of the phrase “Oh, I was going to do that!”

“And then he came home and said ‘oh I was just going to do that today,' right?” wrote one commenter. Another echoed, “He comes home [and says] ‘Babe, I was planning on doing that.'”

Other female commenters shared their own stories of manual labor they felt they had to do after months or years of their male partners stonewalling them. Some women said this repeated behavior led to divorce or separation and guessed that this was in Krys's future as well.

“This is a break up documentary and then he would say there were no signs,” a viewer said.

“My ex-husband also taught me how to be single,” another wrote. “We didn't notice any difference when I finally evicted him.”

Women divorcing men: The divorce gender gap

The phenomenon of men not meeting their partners' needs is well documented, with a comic book called “The Mental Load” even being dedicated to the topic. The Daily Mail reported that “women are more likely than men to seek a divorce because they get frustrated when men do not pull their weight” around the home.

Women file for divorce significantly more often than men do, with one sociological study finding that women initiated 69% of all divorces, compared to 31% for men. The author of the study, Stanford sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld, told the American Sociological Association (ASA) that this figure likely has little to do with women being “more sensitive to relationship difficulties,” as “were this true, women would initiate the breakup of both marriages and nonmarital relationships at equal rates.”

“Women seem to have a predominant role in initiating divorces in the U.S. as far back as there is data from a variety of sources, back to the 1940s,” Rosenfeld told the ASA. “I assumed, and I think other scholars assumed, that women's role in breakups was an essential attribute of heterosexual relationships, but it turns out that women's role in initiating breakups is unique to heterosexual marriage … I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality.”

Buzz News reached out to Krys via TikTok comment.