Thanks so much for researching this and writing it. I felt silly when I felt so hurt/sad/angry about the Ned/Try Guys drama--but those feelings were real and they come from so many places. I feel bad for Ariel-that all of this is happening. What do I do with my copy of Date Night Cookbook.... (the meatball recipe is pretty good) ((I wasn't a super fan of the Try Guys but remembered them from their buzz feed days and would watch their new vids from time to time--although the Keith ones--where he eats an entire menu drew me in more often-I was aware of Ned and Ariel and what seemingly cute and perfect life they had-hence, buying the cookbook at Christmas for my boyfriend and I to cook through this year-we've only made like 4 recipes from the book)). What if they get back together? I have the same scorched/salted earth feelings about cheating and I can't wait to tell my boyfriend the same thing when I get home from work today. :) I'm sorry I don't remember which other great newsletter recommended you to me but I've been reading and enjoying for a few months--thanks!
“A Wife Guy doesn’t talk about his wife as a person, he talks about her as a vessel of virtues. In his telling she is always more selfless than him, more kind, much wiser, and more patient. Wife Guys are never really talking about their wives, they’re talking about themselves. Mormon Wife Guys want you to know a saint chose them. Her choice reinforces their authority in the church.”
Wow. Wow. Wow. You just articulated why I got so bothered in church when I heard men speak about their wives like this. And come to think of it, almost exclusively by men in leadership positions.
You had me SO WORRIED ABOUT YOU AND RILEY, Meg!! Until your end lines at least. Phew. Love the parallel you draw between the Mormon wife guys and wives, and the pop culture ones. Also, the parallels yet distinctions between the LDS church and the evangelical one are very fascinating to me (I was raised in the latter, but with many Mormon friends growing up).
Thanks for this analysis of The American Home that I didn’t know I needed. I don’t know anything about the Try Guys but I see the enterprise you described all around me. (And it took me all day to read this between all of my work and home tasks, but your writing and ideas kept me coming back so it wasn’t just an open tab on my phone. Just wanted you to know)
I remember a wife at church being enraged at her husband refusing to promise that he would never cheat. He always responded that the minute you mature that guarantee you take it for granted and stop trying. He promised he would always TRY to put her and the family first.
I knew him first and best--I'd worked closely alongside him as a missionary. I loved him like a brother because I had brothers and one was a missionary when I was. We met again a few years after missions and phoned a few times but never dated. He was on a wife guy track, and I was headed for a PhD.
I met his wife when they moved to where I was in grad school for him to get an MBA. He went to school full time. She didn't work; she was trying to get pregnant and then stay pregnant. She had a grad degree and a past career, but in her Mormon upbringing that had been only time-filler while she waited to marry. I liked her very much. She believed that vegetables were best in cream sauces, pretzel jello salad was salad, and sticky buns were dinner rolls (all in the same meal). She was enacting Mormon motherhood with ferocity long before she was a mother.
I knew too much about their marriage in the early months. She liked me very much as well, but also seemed to need some reassuring that I was not "the one that got away." I was never going to be a Mormon wife, although I did not know it at that time, I suspected it, and unconsciously engineered my life to avoid it.
She had told me about his refusal to promise when I picked her up one night to go eat cake. He told me when I brought her home that he felt that once someone promises they take for granted the work needed to sustain a healthy marriage and he'd seen too many guys phoning it in. I didn't understand why she was so upset and couldn't understand his point of view. I knew the likelihood of him cheating was extremely low. He was a Wife Guy before that was a thing we labeled.
Your analysis here explains exactly why. Her entire identity at that point was being The Wife. Any threat to that was existential. Once she had a baby we stopped being friends. I was in the angsty part of my PhD and she was swallowed up by the young moms at church. I had other mom friends who were staying home and raising kids while husbands finished grad programs and launched careers, but none had worked so hard to jettison their education and former careers to flatten themselves into The Wife as she had.
Such a great article Meg. The throughline and legacy of Victorian ideals of the angel in the house are so with us--it wasn't always like that! Women and men worked alongside each other and with others to keep their homes/business/farm afloat. But the work women did became so stratified and exploited when they increased wages to encourage men to work outside the home and women to stay invisible. What shocks me is that as a progressive woman in senior positions, I've had other women tell me at different times that I didn't really need my job so I shouldn't be competing for a promotion. Or that I didn't really have to work because my husband worked. I was truly gobsmacked--I naively thought in the 21st century?? Yup. Incredible how the misogyny is baked into everything. Have you read More Work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan? Stunning how deliberate so much of these systems and structures truly are. And I loved this line: "I wasn’t formed by the nuclear family, I was formed by the nuclear fusion of stars we can’t build telescopes big enough to see." Hell yes!
I spent most of my adult life trying to avoid getting married (and mostly succeeded--which I’m not sorry about!) Being extremely distrustful of marriage but also being raised in a culture that staked my entire identity and salvation to it was the great paradox of my 20’s and 30’s (talk about a misspent youth!). I have never seen that paradox put into words as clearly as it is in this essay. Thank you for this! I wish I’d had it in 2005 ❤️
Thanks so much for researching this and writing it. I felt silly when I felt so hurt/sad/angry about the Ned/Try Guys drama--but those feelings were real and they come from so many places. I feel bad for Ariel-that all of this is happening. What do I do with my copy of Date Night Cookbook.... (the meatball recipe is pretty good) ((I wasn't a super fan of the Try Guys but remembered them from their buzz feed days and would watch their new vids from time to time--although the Keith ones--where he eats an entire menu drew me in more often-I was aware of Ned and Ariel and what seemingly cute and perfect life they had-hence, buying the cookbook at Christmas for my boyfriend and I to cook through this year-we've only made like 4 recipes from the book)). What if they get back together? I have the same scorched/salted earth feelings about cheating and I can't wait to tell my boyfriend the same thing when I get home from work today. :) I'm sorry I don't remember which other great newsletter recommended you to me but I've been reading and enjoying for a few months--thanks!
“A Wife Guy doesn’t talk about his wife as a person, he talks about her as a vessel of virtues. In his telling she is always more selfless than him, more kind, much wiser, and more patient. Wife Guys are never really talking about their wives, they’re talking about themselves. Mormon Wife Guys want you to know a saint chose them. Her choice reinforces their authority in the church.”
Wow. Wow. Wow. You just articulated why I got so bothered in church when I heard men speak about their wives like this. And come to think of it, almost exclusively by men in leadership positions.
You had me SO WORRIED ABOUT YOU AND RILEY, Meg!! Until your end lines at least. Phew. Love the parallel you draw between the Mormon wife guys and wives, and the pop culture ones. Also, the parallels yet distinctions between the LDS church and the evangelical one are very fascinating to me (I was raised in the latter, but with many Mormon friends growing up).
“In my experience, forgiveness requires a rising agent.” ☠️
Thanks for this analysis of The American Home that I didn’t know I needed. I don’t know anything about the Try Guys but I see the enterprise you described all around me. (And it took me all day to read this between all of my work and home tasks, but your writing and ideas kept me coming back so it wasn’t just an open tab on my phone. Just wanted you to know)
I remember a wife at church being enraged at her husband refusing to promise that he would never cheat. He always responded that the minute you mature that guarantee you take it for granted and stop trying. He promised he would always TRY to put her and the family first.
I knew him first and best--I'd worked closely alongside him as a missionary. I loved him like a brother because I had brothers and one was a missionary when I was. We met again a few years after missions and phoned a few times but never dated. He was on a wife guy track, and I was headed for a PhD.
I met his wife when they moved to where I was in grad school for him to get an MBA. He went to school full time. She didn't work; she was trying to get pregnant and then stay pregnant. She had a grad degree and a past career, but in her Mormon upbringing that had been only time-filler while she waited to marry. I liked her very much. She believed that vegetables were best in cream sauces, pretzel jello salad was salad, and sticky buns were dinner rolls (all in the same meal). She was enacting Mormon motherhood with ferocity long before she was a mother.
I knew too much about their marriage in the early months. She liked me very much as well, but also seemed to need some reassuring that I was not "the one that got away." I was never going to be a Mormon wife, although I did not know it at that time, I suspected it, and unconsciously engineered my life to avoid it.
She had told me about his refusal to promise when I picked her up one night to go eat cake. He told me when I brought her home that he felt that once someone promises they take for granted the work needed to sustain a healthy marriage and he'd seen too many guys phoning it in. I didn't understand why she was so upset and couldn't understand his point of view. I knew the likelihood of him cheating was extremely low. He was a Wife Guy before that was a thing we labeled.
Your analysis here explains exactly why. Her entire identity at that point was being The Wife. Any threat to that was existential. Once she had a baby we stopped being friends. I was in the angsty part of my PhD and she was swallowed up by the young moms at church. I had other mom friends who were staying home and raising kids while husbands finished grad programs and launched careers, but none had worked so hard to jettison their education and former careers to flatten themselves into The Wife as she had.
Such a great article Meg. The throughline and legacy of Victorian ideals of the angel in the house are so with us--it wasn't always like that! Women and men worked alongside each other and with others to keep their homes/business/farm afloat. But the work women did became so stratified and exploited when they increased wages to encourage men to work outside the home and women to stay invisible. What shocks me is that as a progressive woman in senior positions, I've had other women tell me at different times that I didn't really need my job so I shouldn't be competing for a promotion. Or that I didn't really have to work because my husband worked. I was truly gobsmacked--I naively thought in the 21st century?? Yup. Incredible how the misogyny is baked into everything. Have you read More Work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan? Stunning how deliberate so much of these systems and structures truly are. And I loved this line: "I wasn’t formed by the nuclear family, I was formed by the nuclear fusion of stars we can’t build telescopes big enough to see." Hell yes!
I spent most of my adult life trying to avoid getting married (and mostly succeeded--which I’m not sorry about!) Being extremely distrustful of marriage but also being raised in a culture that staked my entire identity and salvation to it was the great paradox of my 20’s and 30’s (talk about a misspent youth!). I have never seen that paradox put into words as clearly as it is in this essay. Thank you for this! I wish I’d had it in 2005 ❤️
Oh Meg this is so good! I can tell this was hard to write, but thank you for diving deep like always!