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About

Shredded Cheese Fajita Sad Wife, also known as My Wife, Date Night After 3+ Months, is a copypasta image macro meme based on a tweet of a forlorn-looking woman and caption describing an experience waiting for shredded cheese at a Mexican food restaurant in Texas, following a three-month quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic. Many online replaced the photograph, adding the caption to various images of women looking upset. The original tweet reads:

@MiCocina_TexMex My wife, date night after 3+ months locked up on quarantine. Waiting for shredded cheese as it's the only way she can eat fajitas. We've asked 4 people, going on 18 minutes now. Just unreal at Allen, TX location. We gotta quit blaming #COVID19 for crappy service.

Origin

On June 27th, 2020, Twitter^[1] user @jsv4 tweeted a photograph of a woman looking at a table of food at a Mexican restaurant. They wrote, "@MiCocina_TexMex My wife, date night after 3+ months locked up on quarantine. Waiting for shredded cheese as it’s the only way she can eat fajitas. We’ve asked 4 people, going on 18 minutes now. Just unreal at Allen, TX location. We gotta quit blaming #COVID19 for crappy service." Before being deleted, the tweet received more than 1,500 likes and 500 retweets (shown below).

Spread

Following the post, people began mocking the couple, referring to the man who took the photograph as "Shredded Cheese Wife Guy." Twitter user @skloanach tweeted a video remix of the photograph, setting it to the Simon & Garfunkle song "The Sound of Silence." The tweet received more than 41,000 views, 1,800 likes and 220 retweets in less than two days (shown below).

Hello darkness my old friend…. pic.twitter.com/fodn2GKP38

— ElElegante101 (@skolanach) June 28, 2020

Throughout the day, people continued to post about the video. Twitter^[2] user @sulcusandjirehs tweeted, "i love logging on to twitter dot com and reading a weird series of words referenced by several people and having to trace it back to the source like i’m some sort of detective for a case with zero stakes. tonight’s phrase is 'shredded cheese fajita sad wife.'" The tweet received more than 18,000 likes and 1,800 retweets in less than two days (shown below, left).

Others posted art based on the image. Twitter^[4] user @ass_dentata tweeted a painting of the woman with the caption, "My Wife Waiting For Shredded Cheese As It’s The Only Way She Can Eat Fajitas." The tweet received more than 39,000 likes and 3,400 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below, center).

Some used the caption as a copypasta, combining it with pictures of other women. For example, Washington Post journalist Dave Weigel tweeted^[5] an image from the film Beetlejuice. The post received more than 2,000 likes and 120 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below, right).

After the tweet went viral, the original poster, @jsv4, tweeted,^[3] "Yes, I was asked nicely to. What was clearly satire & a simple post…took off way more than needed. Clearly I know there are bigger issues in the world, we’ll survive & learned a valuable social media lesson overnight. #CheeseIsLife."

On June 29th, the website Junkee^[6] published a report on the meme.

Various Examples

External References