Another reality marriage bites the dust

Yet another reality TV marriage has fallen. Last week, TMZ reported that Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Jen Affleck had filed a petition for divorce in Utah from her husband, Zac. For anyone who has followed the show, the news may not have come as the biggest surprise given the turmoil the pair has navigated throughout the show. But for Zac, it just might have been, considering he only learned about the petition from a TMZ reporter.

A few days after reports of Jen’s filing surfaced, Zac took to TikTok to give more details about the split.

“Jen came to me about a year ago after ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and told me she was unhappy and wanted a divorce. And I basically begged her to stay, told her I would work on things, fix things, become whoever she needed me to be, and ultimately, just…we couldn’t make it work.”

Zac went on to say that his priority was the children, saying he had fears over the ‘damage’ this might cause to them, and that he still had hopes for them to have a ‘normal childhood’. But it was his apparent mischaracterization of him being Jen’s ‘biggest fan’ and still wanting to ‘support’ her that caused Jen to take to her own social media to set the record straight and show a different reality than the one Zac was painting. One of the videos featured her filming a video just two weeks after giving birth, where Zac can be heard in the background saying:

“I hope you’re not making a TikTok looking like that. Your boobs are literally like…your tits are sagging all over. You don’t want to post that, baby, I can tell you that right now.”

She captioned the video, saying “he was never my biggest supporter” with text on screen that read POV: your two weeks postpartum trying to become an influencer.

She posted a second video, which has now been deleted, where Zac could be heard in the background asking why there was a towel on the floor. Jen let him know it was there because it was dirty.

“Well, what am I supposed to shower with?” he asked. “Is there no other towels?”

She responded by saying that she’s been doing his laundry ‘forever’ and that if she had some help it would be nice and perhaps then they’d have some towels. In response to this, Zac can be seen in the background of the video giving Jen what can only be described as a death stare.

While some couples certainly prefer to keep their marital issues out of the public eye, there are other couples who have been pretty open with the issues they’re navigating. In some cases, entire shows have been created to chronicle what these couples face daily. But in other cases, the shows end up chronicling marriages that were either already fractured or became that way in the process of filming. So the question becomes, what came first, the chicken or the egg? But in this case, is it the show? Or the troubled marriage?

Since the early days of reality TV, where shows like Jon & Kate Plus 8, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, Meet the Barkers, Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen and Dave, Britney and Kevin: Chaotic and Hogan Knows Best reigned supreme, seeing troubled marriages on TV started to become very commonplace. The illusion that marriages between celebrities were any less flawed than your average couple was done away with and we saw that money and fame might actually make unions even more complicated, tense and toxic. Whether these couples were navigating what it was like raising massive families, navigating new nuptials, planning extravagant weddings or dealing with infidelity, people were being granted access to previously unchartered territory.

Most of the couples I mentioned went on to divorce after cameras stopped rolling. But in the 2010s, a new phenomenon emerged where we started seeing the collapse of marriages and the actual divorce itself on TV. Between 2007 and 2015, on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, audiences were witness to the start and finish of Kim and Kris Humphries’ 72-day marriage, along with the on and off again relationship of Kourtney and Scott Disick, which ultimately ended in separation as the pair never legally married. 

We also watched on as former Real Housewives of New York star Bethenny Frankel split from Jason Hoppy, as chronicled on the spinoff shows Bethenny Getting Married and Bethenny Ever After. Their divorce was as messy as messy could be and took years of litigation. Other couples like Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott, Kendra Wilkinson and Hank Bassett, Amber Portwood and Gary Shirley all experienced breakdowns in their relationships, on camera for the world to see.

That’s when we started seeing the emergence of shows that offered a different perspective on marriage. Shows like 90 Day Fiancé, which explored the power dynamics between couples where one partner was relocating, typically to the United States, to marry their spouse; shows like Sister Wives, which followed a union that involved multiple women sharing a husband, with each woman bearing their own children for the man; shows like Love is Blind and Married at First Sight where people met their spouses in a very different way than would be considered ‘normal’.

This leads me back to my original question about whether cameras are simply portraying marriages that were already fractured or whether those relationships became fractured over the course of filming. Personally, I think it’s a mix of both.

There is something about having to be a witness to your own marriage that allows you to see it in an entirely different way. In addition to watching your partnership on screen, just as the rest of us do, social media has made it so that people can quite literally offer commentary on your life, and this can be just as annoying as much as it can be a saving grace.

We’ve seen so many examples of how these shows and the audience helped save people, mostly women, from toxic relationships. Former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Taylor Armstrong did an interview with Life After Bravo in 2020, saying that she hadn’t realized how unhealthy her marriage was until she watched a season of the show and began comparing her marriage to the marriages of her cast mates. She recalled asking her co-star Lisa Vanderpump if her husband, Ken, checked her phone. Lisa said that if he did, she would divorce him. In fact, it was through the show that the abuse Taylor was suffering at the hands of her husband, Russell, came to light. It happened when Camille Grammer publicly confronted her about it while cameras were rolling.

It's moments like this that shift the conversation to one being about whether reality TV produces toxic relationships, or whether reality television has gradually transformed relationship dysfunction into a form of entertainment. Did Camille force that revelation out of genuine care and concern for Taylor? Or because she knew it would make good TV? Could it be both? And if so, is that…ethical? These are the questions reality TV audiences often sit with and mull over. This is why there’s a world of podcasts, after shows and social media pages dedicated to this entire industry. This is why there are such strong parasocial relationships at play. We get to know these stars so intimately and then take it away into our own personal lives, our own personal relationships and our own personal interactions.

Getting back to Zac and Jen, I want to revisit the video Zac released days after Jen filed. It racked up over 10 million views and over 10,000 comments. And the top comment reads:

“A year ago she asked you for a divorce and you responded by getting her pregnant?”, earning that commenter nearly 150,000 likes.

I think this comment so accurately represents one of the biggest shifts that reality TV has had a hand in – which is the departure from how women have typically viewed marriage and motherhood. It's no coincidence that the minute these women start to amass enough wealth to go it alone, many of them do. For some women, they leave even before their finances allow for it.

Through reality TV, so many women have shared similar stories of how the men in their lives have weaponized the two institutions that have been sold to us as these major life accolades, the highest thing we can aspire to, against them. In cases where they haven’t shared their story per se, they’ve simply allowed us to bear witness to it, and often times, it’s still enough to get us to arrive at the same conclusion. Which is that marriage and motherhood is not all it’s cracked up to be, particularly when the person you are most actively involved in these institutions with is reminding you that your tits, just two months after giving birth, are sagging and that there is laundry to be done. Every time a woman in the reality TV spotlight makes the choice to leave an unhealthy marriage, she makes it just a wee bit easier for the next woman, whether in the reality TV space or not, to do the same. And say whatever you want about reality TV, but I think that’s pretty powerful.