In early January, Kristen Bell and Cher joined Dax Shepard to record an episode of his podcast, Armchair Expert. It soon devolved into an awkward, if painfully relatable, situation: a confrontation between your husband and your friend who has never liked him. After Cher said Bell was Shepard’s “better half,” he asked who her “dream partner” for Bell would be, “because I know you think she could do better, and I don’t disagree.” Neither did viewers. “Cher is right,” they wrote under the now-viral clips of the interaction. “He hates and resents his wife.”
Bell laughed it off and told Cher that Shepard was “almost too good” for her. It wasn’t the first time she found herself defending their relationship. In 2020, Bell joked about the time she left Shepard a note asking him to do laundry, leading to a fight so intense they didn’t speak for three days; to mark their 12th wedding anniversary this past October, Bell wrote a post on Instagram dedicated to “the man who once said to me: I would never kill you … Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.”
The strange joke (or was it a confession?) sparked so much backlash that Bell limited her Instagram comments. A few weeks later, writer and YouTuber Melanie Hamlett posted a song she wrote skewering the couple’s dynamic, and Bell popped up in her notifications. “You don’t know me, my husband, or my marriage, which is filled with love and laughter btw,” she wrote in a series of comments under the post. Hamlett apologized for hurting Bell’s feelings — she’d made a mean video, she admits — but doubled down on her criticism. “How she talks about her relationship, all these ‘cute, funny stories’ that she tells about things that happen in marriages that will wear a woman down — I don’t think any of that’s ever funny,” Hamlett said in another post. “We’re allowed to have opinions on that, because you gave this to us. What, we’re not supposed to say anything?”
Of course, no one understands the nuances of a relationship better than the people inside it. But the dustup illustrates a phenomenon we’ve probably all experienced more often than we would like to, when a friend or stranger shares tidbits of her partner’s bad behavior — shirking household chores, making off-color jokes that subtly put her down, even cheating — but will still defend him when anyone calls him out. It’s whiplash: “My husband hates me,” the shtick begins, followed by some version of “Stop, guys, it was a joke” or “You don’t understand our relationship.”
There’s the woman who posted a video about how her husband tried to destroy her favorite Tom Ford perfume by smashing the bottle against the sink and broke the sink instead. “It backfired,” she wrote. When commenters said her husband’s behavior was unfunny and abusive, she posted a screenshot of money she has made from TikTok, which “haters” contribute to “when they comment hate.” Another told followers that her husband, who sits in the car with her as she films, has never called her “beautiful” before. “Do you know what he says?” she asks, panning over to him. “‘You look great,’ like, ‘That food is great.’” Viewers pointed out that men unwilling to praise their partners are insecure, and she reversed course. “He does compliment me!” she replied. “He just uses unusual adjectives to do so.” In one infamous TikTok, a woman says she’s on her fifth day of silence with her fiancé after he bought her a cheap butter dish for Christmas while she got him an Xbox. “It was just a joke. I didn’t expect the video to blow up,” the woman replied to a comment arguing he could have done more for his partner. In a follow-up post, she told everyone how much she loves Kerrygold and insisted the original video was just for laughs. “You 100 percent deserve what you tolerate,” one commenter replied.
You might argue that these videos are little more than sitcom schlock or rage-bait meant to maximize engagement. But the fury viewers feel is real. In a moment when women are reexamining the value of hetero relationships, many are tired of telling friends and loved ones to leave the men dragging them down. They don’t want to commiserate; they want you to do better.
Commenters wonder, If you’re going to get angry at the peanut gallery, why post at all? Some women probably hope that having an audience will help their partner change. “One of the most common tactics when people are trying to make a point in their relationship and can’t get through is to say, ‘I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Let me bring in the troops. Let me bring in the masses,’ ” says the psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perel. But attention from the masses won’t always stop a man from embarrassing you. Consider the Bravoverse: Season after season, husbands debase their wives on-camera, from Vanderpump Rules’s Tom Schwartz dumping a drink on his future ex-wife, Katie Maloney, to Summer House’s Kyle Cooke calling his wife, Amanda Batula, a “fucking bitch” for broaching the subject of career change. (“She wants to have a passion project?” Cooke, in a backward white baseball cap, mocked. “She wants to have purpose? Okay, cool, I want to be a DJ.”) Both men admitted to cheating, their spouse cried, she took him back, then it happened again ad infinitum. At some point, the drama feels less like juicy reality TV and more like ritual humiliation. Viewers start to turn on a woman who can’t seem to respect herself and even redirect their rage at her. When Cooke and Batula finally announced they were separating this year, fans celebrated to the tune of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” and shared memes joking about Batula getting released from jail.
It doesn’t always work out that way. For many dysfunctional couples, nothing brings them closer than finding a common enemy in the comments section. It’s triangulation, says Perel: “You’re going to be the loser of it, you’re going to be attacked, because the two people actually supposed to be in an argument are now completely aligned with each other, and you’re on the outs.”
Not everyone who’s posting about their relationship problems is here to shame their partners; some just really want to share. In 2021, four months before her wedding, a 23-year-old North Carolina influencer named Gabrielle found out her fiancé had cheated on her with his co-worker. They went to counseling, worked through it, and had the wedding as planned — but years later, Gabrielle had the urge to tell her followers about it. Maybe, she thought, her story could help someone else navigating a similar situation. This past December, after talking it over with her husband, she finally decided to make a video five years after his infidelity. She expected the negative comments, though it felt as though many were misconstruing her message; she decided to post another video with her husband to give him a chance to share his side of the story. “The truth is,” he says, as the couple films in their car, “there’s not a good reason; there’s not a good excuse. It happened because I was in a place in my life where
I had no accountability, I had no good friendships. I was struggling with video-game addiction.” Gabrielle chimes in — being in a bad place in your life, she says, is not an excuse for bad behavior — as her husband nods along. That video inspired parodies and got plenty of comments telling Gabrielle to leave him. “It’s hard to navigate because my intention was never, ever, to defend him,” she tells me. “But, of course, it comes off that way because I did choose to stay.”
What is it about a random couple’s marriage that can set off such an explosive reaction? Commenters sometimes get too worked up about someone else’s affairs. But many of us get secondhand embarrassment from these women because their experiences hit close to home — the treatment they seem to normalize for themselves reminds us of what we might once have normalized for ourselves.
About a decade ago, Hamlett got into her first serious relationship, with a man who she says then tried to kill her. Despite his abuse, she struggled to leave. Without her friends, she wouldn’t have realized how unhealthy it was. “They did not enable me,” Hamlett says. “They stopped laughing at my jokes; they didn’t co-sign the lies I was telling myself. And that saved my life.”
Strangers on the internet may not understand why you stay. Sometimes, though, they can help you leave. In mid-January, 36-year-old Chantelle made a series of videos about being a “single married woman” after her husband of six years asked her for “space” and left her to take care of their home and dogs alone. Christmas, New Year’s, and her birthday passed with no contact from him. The enraged women who saw her posts told her that she deserved better, that this wasn’t okay. Chantelle had been thinking many of the same thoughts, yet it was eye-opening to hear them from others. Before long, she was liking comments and even replying, thanking viewers for their compassion and getting real about how difficult it was to take the steps to leave. “Even talking to you now, I still want to protect and defend him,” she tells me. But the comments stayed with her. After six weeks of silence, Chantelle’s husband texted her to “catch up.” She reached out to a divorce lawyer.
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