Did ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Ruin Jen Affleck’s Life or Save It?

By Emma Chance | TV | September 13, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | TV | September 13, 2024 |

Spoilers for this season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

Maybe I missed something, but I was expecting The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to be an investigation into the “Soft Swinging” scandal that imploded the Mormon “MomTok” community. Instead, it took the survivors of said scandal and shoved them all together to hang out and talk about sex and stuff a la The Real Housewives, but in this case the women are all 20-somethings and have the same hair extensions.

The online discourse has mostly been about Taylor Paul, who was the one who broke the news of the swinging scandal in the first place, and her frenemy, Whitney Leavitt. Paul has a lot of very un-Mormon drama going on in her personal life, and Leavitt is the token short-haired girl who has strong opinions about everything and probably some kind of personality disorder.

The most interesting character to come out of the show, though, is neither of them, but a young woman by the name of Jen Affleck, not to be confused with J-Lo, though her husband is distantly related to Ben Affleck. But that’s not important to what we’re here to talk about today.

Affleck was not an original member of MomTok, but cast on the show as a bonafide member of the Mormon church and, you know, also a cute girl who would fit in with the other conventionally cute girls. Her relationship with her husband Zac and their life with their two young children seemed stable and sacred initially, but the other women hinted at Zac’s controlling nature throughout the series. It all came to a head during a trip to Vegas when Jen unknowingly went to Chippendales with her gang of girlfriends (it was someone’s birthday, and the show was a surprise), uncomfortably posed for photos with oiled-up male dancers, and then cried over the phone as her husband threatened to divorce her. The same husband whom she gave $2,500 in cash to for the trip so he could gamble. So, you know, super godly stuff all around.

Jen fielded Zac’s threatening texts and phone calls all night before ending up at his hotel room (the women were staying separately because it was supposed to be a girls’ trip), where she said they argued all night but eventually made up. That wasn’t good enough for the girls, whom Jen reunited with at a bar the next night, where they basically implored her to dump him. They had good intentions and everything but, my god, maybe let’s talk about this when we get back home to Utah and have all slept more than 3 hours? At the end of the show, we saw Jen and Zac considering a move to New York so he could attend medical school, which would mean leaving MomTok for Jen, even though she was the breadwinner as an influencer.

“It’s scary to have your relationship exposed to the world,” Jen now says. “We went into the season in a rocky place, but I still wanted to move forward with filming because that felt right to me, my career, and wanting to provide for my family. Looking back, it’s probably the best thing to happen to us, because a lot of the things they showed were things I didn’t want to acknowledge. That’s something a lot of members of the Church do, and I think that’s something that needs to change in the culture.”

“Since filming, we’ve done therapy nonstop,” she added. “If we continue in our relationship, there are changes that need to be made. If they’re not made, we might have to…look at other options. But as of right now, I do think he’s trying his best to make those changes.”

Quite literally, Jesus Christ. There is an important message within Jen’s struggle that’s getting lost under all the manufactured drama and fake hair: these women are getting married and having babies often before they could legally drink if their religion allowed it, and then they wake up one day and their husbands are yelling at them for looking at some abs while they gamble their pocket money away. The other women on the show were absolutely right—he is controlling, and she would most definitely be happier without him—but leaving a relationship you’ve been in since you were a teenager, when you were raised to believe that your sole purpose on the earth was to have children and be a good wife, is much easier said than done. That’s what the show should be about, not who’s the queen of a TikTok creator community.

Exposing the cracks in her marriage to a national audience might have ruined Jen’s life, but if it gets her more opportunities to escape and find herself, it might have also saved it. And it might help her save the lives of more women like her.