By Ella Prieto, Staff Writer
In May 2021, Comedian John Mulaney shocked fans when it was announced he was getting a divorce from his wife Anna Marie Tendler after seven years of marriage. Quickly after that announcement, fans learned that Mulaney was not only dating actress Olivia Munn but was expecting a child with her in Sept 2021. This rapid timeline made many question Mulaney’s faithfulness and overall character, mainly because of how he had crafted his career around loving Tendler. In hindsight, his comments that Tendler is “my hero” and that he is “lucky to be next to [her]” seem more calculated than sweet.
Flash forward to Sept 2022 and the internet sees a strikingly similar story. Ned Fulmer, a member of the comedian group “Try Guys,” is exposed for cheating on his wife Ariel Fulmer of ten years, with whom he has two children. Like Mulaney, Fulmer had branded his content and career around being a loving family man who worships his wife. His actions, of course, show anything but those values.
While Mulaney and Fulmer have been the biggest cheating scandals that come to mind for most people, they are far from the only husbands to stray. Earlier in Sept 2022, Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine was exposed for cheating on his wife of eight years, model Behati Prinsloo. Nov 2021, a video surfaced of musical star Anthony Ramos cheating on his fiance fellow musical star, Jasmine Cephas Jones. Again both Ramos and Levine frequently celebrated and cherished their partners.
So what gives? Why are there consistently men who rave about their partners and then cheat on them?
Some have labeled this phenomenon as the “Wife Guy.” Buzzfeed defines the wife guy as someone “whose fame or branding is largely predicated on the fact that he’s in love with the woman he married.” This relates to the rising popularity of family content on social media. Viewers love to see a perfect, happy family which often leads to this wife guy persona being built up. The persona is just that, however: a persona.
Wife guys are simply capitalizing on viewers’ emotions, creating a personality that will get them the most amount of money possible. Like many social media creators, they are inherently fake, and seek to monetize all aspects of their lives, even private aspects like their partners and children.
This is not to say that every single social media creator that has a partner and family is fake and using them for money; many of them are honest and truthful in their values. Yet, many of them are not, and it is important to consume the media they make with a grain of salt.
Wife guys can talk about how they love their wives all day, but they often fail to act on those words. Their wives slowly become distant figures, another piece in their ploy to build a parasocial empire. And when they inevitably stray, the Internet watches their brand burn and crash.
