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!
At least you’d heard of them! I didn’t even know The Try Guys existed until last week! And I still - obviously - felt very very many feelings over the whole thing. Thank you so much for being here!
“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).
I am not going to lie, Jason. I felt proud of myself for that one and even said, "oh damn" when I wrote it. It was one of those lines I wrote before I thought...if that makes sense.
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)
Carla, thank you so so much for taking the time to read it! I just got the ability to record audio narration of my essays and add them to podcast feeds. I hope to do that with longer essays in the future. BUT! In the meantime! If you use the substack app, there is an audio option for my essays! It's automated narration, but it sounds pretty good!
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.
This is such a painful anecdote. Just from every angle. When you are taught that Mormon Motherhood (with its limited scope of what Motherhood can be) is your eternal role (and the role that will save you for eternity) then maybe it's little wonder you start obsessively perfecting dinner rolls. I was so close to becoming some slightly more progressive version of your friend. On my own, not with Riley's help even! But I also wonder about the husband - why do promises mean no longer trying? And what does that mean within the context of eternal promises? And was that in the back of her mind as she reacted? I wonder, a little, how much of her fear also had to do with the fact that Mormon men are historically Wives Guys, not just Wife Guys.
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 have not read that! I am adding it to my list of must reads! The legacy of the industrial revolution's version of the myth of the separate spheres is so vivid still. And .... well it's not even a legacy is it? We're still just living and breathing with the actual myth.
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!
At least you’d heard of them! I didn’t even know The Try Guys existed until last week! And I still - obviously - felt very very many feelings over the whole thing. Thank you so much for being here!
“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.
It was a painful thing for me to realize, honestly. Because the implications are just so...comprehensive.
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).
OH NO! I am so sorry!!! And you are so, so lovely to be worried! And yes, I've noticed those same similarities and differences too!
“In my experience, forgiveness requires a rising agent.” ☠️
I am not going to lie, Jason. I felt proud of myself for that one and even said, "oh damn" when I wrote it. It was one of those lines I wrote before I thought...if that makes sense.
You were right to feel proud! I had to pause in the middle of reading your excellent piece just to admire what you did there.
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)
Carla, thank you so so much for taking the time to read it! I just got the ability to record audio narration of my essays and add them to podcast feeds. I hope to do that with longer essays in the future. BUT! In the meantime! If you use the substack app, there is an audio option for my essays! It's automated narration, but it sounds pretty good!
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.
This is such a painful anecdote. Just from every angle. When you are taught that Mormon Motherhood (with its limited scope of what Motherhood can be) is your eternal role (and the role that will save you for eternity) then maybe it's little wonder you start obsessively perfecting dinner rolls. I was so close to becoming some slightly more progressive version of your friend. On my own, not with Riley's help even! But I also wonder about the husband - why do promises mean no longer trying? And what does that mean within the context of eternal promises? And was that in the back of her mind as she reacted? I wonder, a little, how much of her fear also had to do with the fact that Mormon men are historically Wives Guys, not just Wife Guys.
And now I am realizing I really missed an opportunity to use Wives Guys in my essay!
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 have not read that! I am adding it to my list of must reads! The legacy of the industrial revolution's version of the myth of the separate spheres is so vivid still. And .... well it's not even a legacy is it? We're still just living and breathing with the actual myth.
totally. it's maddening.
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!