Hulu named the show "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" and I think we all just let that go.
The entire premise is that these women present one thing publicly while something else entirely is happening inside their marriages. And we watch five seasons of it and the hot take is always about who lied to whom, and never about the model itself.
Jessi and Jordan Ngatikaura's divorce hit publicly earlier this year. Emotional affair. Accusations flying in both directions. A restraining order requested and denied. The whole thing went sideways in front of an audience that had been watching their relationship since season one.
Nobody who watched that show saw a marriage. They saw a performance of one.
The Performance Was Always the Product
The thing about "secret lives" is that the secret part is load-bearing. You cannot build a marriage on top of a performance and expect the structure to hold. At some point, the gap between what you are presenting and what you are actually living becomes the dominant reality of the relationship.
And when that gap gets wide enough, something fills it.
It is never the thing you would have chosen if you had been honest at the start.
What the Divorce Actually Teaches
The Jessi and Jordan situation is not special. It is what happens when image management becomes the main project of the marriage. You stop asking each other the structural questions because you are too busy managing the external ones. What does this post look like? What are we saying to the audience? What version of us are we presenting today?
Those questions are not a marriage. They are content strategy.
And at some point one person in the marriage goes looking for the thing the performance could not give them. Every time. I have seen it. I have lived adjacent to it. The emptiness created by performing a relationship you are not actually in is a very specific kind of loneliness, and it does not stay quiet forever.
The Alternative Is Not Complicated. It Is Just Uncomfortable.
I do not have a perfect answer. I have a different question.
What if the marriage was designed for the two people in it, rather than for the people watching? What does it look like when you agree on the actual structure — not the fantasy of the structure, not the version that photographs well, but the real one — before you start building on it?
That is the only conversation that gets you somewhere different. Everything else is just rearranging the set before the next camera call.
Design it on purpose. With all the actual information on the table. Including the parts that do not fit the narrative.
Brandi and I have been doing this for seventeen years. We are not performing it. There was a long stretch where one of us was, and that stretch was the hardest part of the marriage. The part that got easier was not the arrangement. It was the honesty.
The show should be called something else. But it will not be, because "the secret lives" is what gets the clicks. The version where everybody said the whole truth first does not have the same ring to it.
It just works better.
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