Man Sparks Debate After Saying He Cleaned Out Medicine Cabinet While Wife Was at Work, Then Sent Her Video

Mar. 15, 2025

Stock image of a man looking through a medicine cabinet.Photo:Tom Merton/Getty

Tom Merton/Getty

A Reddit user sparked a major debate online after claiming that he sent his wife a video while she was at work to show that he’d cleaned out their medicine cabinet — actions that he said did not go over well.

“I noticed that there were a lot of medications that were expired and lots of repeats. For example, we had 4 bags of cough drops, 3 bottle of Ibuprofen, etc,” he wrote.

While jettisoning the expired and superfluous meds, the man claimed to have made a video “of the process,” in which he pointed out expiration dates and “explained calmly why these medications needed to be monitored more closely in the future.” He then sent his wife the three-minute video while she was at work.

However, he claimed that when his wife of 30 years called him, she was very upset.

“She accused me of trying to shame her and said she couldn’t understand why I was being so hateful,” he wrote.

Stock image of a medicine cabinet.namaki/Getty

namaki/Getty

“She told me that if I had been so concerned about our medication cabinet that I should have been monitoring it on a daily or weekly basis and that if I was that concerned about cleaning out the medicine cabinet, I would have just done it without making a shame video,” he wrote.

Although the Reddit user claimed he was not “attempting to shame her, but rather to inform her,” he wanted to know what others thought.

“[The fact] that you felt you needed to do this so urgently while you wife was at work, almost treating her like a child, ‘informing’ her versus giving her any agency, is a real AH move,” one person wrote. “Simply discussing with her and coming to a compromise would have been totally fine.”

“You evidentially don’t buy the medicines because otherwise you’d know better what was there. So why did you decide one day to clean it out and to make a point film yourself doing it?” read another comment.

“What was the point of the video? To be right? To ‘show and teach’? To rub her nose in the state of the medicine cabinet?” a third reply noted.

Other commenters chimed in about how medicines vary in type, flavor and what can and cannot be mixed  — and the shelf life of medicines, which can vary depending on the product and what doctors recommend, was also a tropic of discussion.

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Another Redditor pointed out that this was an example of why communication in relationships is so important.“If the state of the medicine cabinet was bothering you, you should have talked to your wife and cleaned it out together,” wrote one commenter. “You’ve been married long enough to know communication is part of a healthy marriage.”

source: people.com