Friendship and the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

I intend to spoil and dish on the whole second season, and touch on the first season, of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, so you can enjoy my commentary post-watch or skip watching it altogether. 

I'm not normally sucked into the hype around reality TV. At least, I think I'm not. I've watched a couple of seasons of Love is Blind, and dipped into reality dating shows like The Boyfriend and The Queer Ultimatum. But I wouldn't say I'm an avid fan of reality TV. I'm a very casual watcher. 

Actually, now that I've binged the second season of the Ultimatum Queer Love, I'm wondering if that's still the case. Maybe I'm a complete sucker for reality TV. I could be part of the wide-reaching intended audience. 

I can admit I've been completely sucked into the allure of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. I binged through the first season, and I was pleasantly surprised when season 2 dropped with 10 new episodes this year. 

The weekend the second season aired, I devoured every juicy episode. At its core, the show follows a group of women living in Utah, ranging in age from their early 20s to their 30s. These women collectively refer to themselves as Momtok as they're prolific content creators on social media platforms, notably TikTok. 

Many of these women have grown up in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Some are still very active members of the church. Their belief system is a constant underlying force on the show. Their beliefs are sometimes implied and at other times made explicit, but the presence of the women's faith is always there. When they go through hard times, the women reassure one another that they have the love of god. There's even a baking competition, in the style of The Great British Bake Off, in which the most dedicated tradwife is set to win. The theme is Mormonism, of course. 

It's difficult for me to understand the religious lives of the women within their temple as an outsider. This is for two main reasons: firstly, the church wants to have no direct association with the show and denies that the women of MomTok are an accurate representation of Mormonism in practice. Secondly, the goings-on within the temple are shrouded in secrecy. 

What we do learn from the show is unsurprising. Men dominate within their community, and we see time and again that the women in the show choose to stand by their husbands despite mistreatment.  At one point, Jessi, a fixture of MomTok between the two seasons, explains that she remains "sealed" to her former husband. Due to their temple marriage ceremony, they remain married despite their legal divorce. They will also remain married in the afterlife. In fact, if a man remarries and that marriage is "sealed," his wives will become sister wives in the afterlife. 

To an outsider, this all sounds unreal. Whether they believe it or not, the pressure on these women is clear. In the eyes of the church, your marriage is eternal and inescapable. Your agency as women is irrelevant to the divine plan. 

This plays out in fascinating ways in practice. Many of the women were married (and subsequently divorced) and have several children, despite many being under 30 years old. Motherhood is what binds these women. After all, their collective name is MomTok. 

Yet, their children are thankfully rarely present on the show. The appeal for tuning in is not to capitalise on their families. A major drawcard for the viewer is the promise of scandal. 

If it weren’t for "soft swinging", it seems we wouldn’t have a show at all. Taylor Frankie Paul is considered the unofficial leader of MomTok. Her initial claim to fame was a tell-all series of TikToks explaining the prevalence of “soft swinging” within her social group. This, of course, completely blew up because viewers are always tempted by a sex scandal. 

But what is soft swinging exactly? In season 2, we meet one of Taylor’s former swinging partners, Miranda. Taylor is forced to be explicit about the goings on between the couples because Miranda’s key objective is to deny that the scandal happened for the most part. She will admit to kissing and nothing more. Taylor is honest to a fault. She explains that Miranda, Taylor, and another female friend, and their partners all had sex next to one another. That's the extent of what happened. 

The scandals are the draw card, but the ongoing appeal of the show is the relationships the women have with one another. These women have become breadwinners in their households and have been catapulted to the status of celebrities. 

These women aren't capitalising on their families, sexuality or even on their religion, as much as they are relying on their friendships for profit. What does that look like in practice? At its best, it's heartwarming. We see these women lean on each other in hard times, party alongside one another and create memories together. But at its worst, these women's interactions with one another are complete carnage. 

I hate the idea of using friendships to spin a profit, but here we are. These women are ostensibly friends, but in reality, their relationships are more akin to coworkers. We watch them struggle through a forced family scenario. They are bonded together by us, the audience. Even women who fell off the radar before the show even aired or partway through, such as Miranda and Whitney, are back for a piece of it. They have no choice but to ignore all previous conflicts if they want a slice of the pie. 

Preexisting friendships on the show are being ruined in the name of money. The climax of the second season revolves around the deterioration of the close friendship between Jessi and Demi over a money dispute. Jessi joined the cast for money negotiations before season 2 and expressed that she is a successful business owner and wasn't too concerned about money. 

Demi, however, was concerned about their potential income from the show, and she was willing to exclude Jessi from the cast to get it. The conflict must have been smoothed over at the time, but by the end of the second season, the women have found a common enemy in Demi as the conflict resurges with a vengeance. Who could do that to a so-called friend? 

Like Taylor, this is where I choose to be a little bit vulnerable. I want to know what keeps our friendships together. Is it finding people to waste away the hours with, or is it finding your people to weather the storm with? At the very core of it, is it shared history that keeps us together? 

As I get older, the reasons that connect me to others have grown and changed. In that process, I know it's normal for people to drop off. The easiest way that this happens is that we get immersed in our own lives and neglect to stay in touch. We even have a term for this, the fade away. 

Any other way we leave each other's lives has to be more deliberate. Recently, I had a friendship end that had lasted, on and off, for well over a decade. The ending was very final but also somehow cold and confusing. I didn't get a final message. When I tried to reach out to them over recent months, their response was cold and lacked effort. 

I started to question it and figured our lives were headed down different paths. I decided it wasn't deliberate. We were growing in different directions. It was a fadeaway. Yet, this idea was shattered when I heard through a mutual friend that our friendship was very much over, and their efforts to leave me out and distance themselves from me were deliberate. 

We're all so different, and there are so many different ways to react to this situation. I decided to say nothing, which doesn't come naturally to me. But sometimes, it's the best and only option. I unfollowed them on social media. I chose a clean slate. The friendship had ended against what I wanted for us, but I did take control of what I could. 

Then I spent a week spiralling. Some people, I'm reluctant to say most, take rejection in their stride. I am not one of those people. My first response is always to blame myself. It took some meaningful conversations with friends and my therapist to help me out of that hole. The thing that surprised me is that this emotional fallout took me out for a week. In my 20s, I would've taken months to recover. 

Now I'm not sure how to feel. You have all these shared memories, inside jokes, things said in confidence, and a whole unique relationship structure and language. It's dead now. It existed only in the past, and that's worth mourning. But it's also worth celebrating. 

It doesn't matter if the other person no longer wants to add new squares to the quilt that is your friendship. You can still admire the craft you once made. I remember rolling around in tears on his couch when I tried to do an impression of my manager, but it came out sounding like the Cookie Monster. I made a beautiful mistake of adding him to a group chat with two of our other friends, which turned into one of the best social experiments of my whole life. I watched him change the nicknames and create a unique and exciting social space that defied our geographic distance. 

I remember the numerous times we got up to mischief in gay bars.  There was the time I dared him to respond to conversations with only Taylor Swift lyrics (very obnoxious in retrospect). We audaciously requested to make out with hot people, with mixed results. We danced until we were so sweaty that his friend had to wring out his top outside of Ivy Bar. 

We celebrated Christmas together, we stayed up all night and drove the streets together. Our friendship was an unweildy, thrilling, and ever-evolving thing. Maybe it was always destined to crash and burn. 

This is self-indulgent, but I like to think his life has a little less colour because I'm not in it. To my great relief, that was his choice. I choose to cherish and nurture my friendships. He chose to let it fizzle out. 

The sad thing is, I asked for so little from him. A text every now and again. The occasional hangout when he came home. Maybe a video call once in a blue moon. Am I the fool here because my bar was so low? More to my point about feeling relieved, now I don't have to worry at the wrong end of the phone anymore. He gave me so little that my feelings about the situation should match. My fatal flaw is that it would never work out that way. I will always love my friends with my whole heart. 

Why did I need to talk about a reality show to get all this out? I guess because making a blog post titled "My friend froze me out and it hurts in a way I could never satisfactorily articulate" makes me feel sick with anxiety. 

The hardest part is the lack of answers because an active and creative brain will also fill in the gaps. At my least generous, I have decided that I wasn't fun enough anymore, or convenient to be in touch with via the internet. I was timid in our correspondence because I was fearful I would be left as the last word in a failed effort to connect. A self-fulfilling prophecy. 

There's another voice, though, one that has emerged after years of hard work and rewiring my brain. The stronger part of me thinks that he wanted to get rid of me because I held him accountable. 

Simply refer to the above. It's hard to be friends with someone who holds you accountable for your shittier and more negligent behaviour. My former friend made it obvious to me that I made him feel bad about himself. 

Well before the final nail in the coffin, I want to believe I was given the explanation I needed. He asked to call me out of the blue for a one-on-one chat, since we no longer lived in the same country, and those had become rare between us. We previously had a group video call with some friends, and I brought up when we first fell out before reconnecting. We were in our early 20s, and we had fallen out over various stupid things in retrospect, and failed to communicate. 

When he called, all those years later, he said that I made him feel bad about the way he had behaved in the past, and still behaves. The conversation was light, and I wanted to smooth things over. I told him none of it mattered anymore, which is true. It really doesn't matter to me anymore. But people tell on themselves, and he gave me the perfect opportunity to get a little peek behind the curtain. I just didn't realise it at the time. 

To move away from a potential vulnerability hangover, let's bring this back to the women of Momtok. A big part of the appeal of reality TV is having access to the excess of these people's lives, and the more we watch them, the more their wealth grows. 

One saving grace is that these women may not want for anything, but they must suffer in other ways.  For better or for worse, these women have joined a community of people, and that comes with certain sacrifices. One of those sacrifices is that they are welcomed into lavish spaces with people they don't particularly like, or even hate. These women have let their relationships be dictated by the never-ending wants of capitalism, at the cost of their options for who they spend their precious time with. 

My former friend and I got to choose each other. He just chose to no longer participate. If he wanted to be around, he could, and we could make many more beautiful memories together. There would also be a trade-off of the investment of time and effort, along with some potentially difficult conversations. Now we can do those things with other people we actually get to choose to be around, and maybe the memories will be just as sweet, the effort will feel effortless, and the difficult conversations will feel worth it. 

I have found a small solace in that fact. Goodbye, my friend. I think you're a shit for what you did to me, but you're investment in us was worth it because, despite all of that, I still wish you the best.