No One on 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' Has Emotionally Graduated Middle School

I won’t name names here, but I happen to have a strong familiarity with the behavior of middle-school kids. The boys are largely oblivious, and aside from gaining six inches since the fifth grade, their behavior is virtually unchanged.

Middle-school girls, on the other hand, are years more mature and often behave like adults, but they haven’t yet developed a filter or restraint. When a group of them are together, they’re the best friends in the world. However, if A, B, C, D, and E are all hanging out, they’ll spend the evening talking shit about F. Later, when A is alone with F, she’ll spill everything C supposedly said, and then A and F will take something minor and twist it into the most hurtful thing C could have possibly uttered. F will swear off C for life, until the next time they’re alone together, at which point they instantly become besties again and start trashing D.

However, if any of the girls — A through F — are alone, they’ll each individually swear they’re done with drama and are focused on themselves and their homework now. At least until the next sleepover.

And the cycle repeats. Presumably until high school, when the friend pool expands and boys finally reach a comparable level of maturity and can, maybe, keep up socially. It’s exhausting, yes, but I honestly believe it’s a useful training ground for adult social dynamics, at least for those who survive it.

Almost no one in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, however, has evolved past this stage. These women are emotionally stuck in seventh grade, and they’re terrible to each other. Worse, most of them seem completely incapable of breaking the cycle. For two seasons now, it’s been the same drama on loop — same fights, same buzzwords, same performative sob sessions, escalating into ever-higher levels of toxicity.

What’s almost impressive is how uniformly they speak in therapy-speak soundbites, drained of all meaning: They’re all “triggered.” They’re all in “trauma therapy.” No one can “trust” anyone else because of past betrayals. Everyone demands that others “take accountability.” They constantly whine about being in a “sisterhood” except that “this is not how women support other women.” They’re all about “forgiveness” and “second chances,” while simultaneously complaining that everyone else has had too many chances.

Each one is convinced she’s the most supportive friend in the group, yet also believes she’s the only one who gets no support or “validation” in return. They all insist their mission is to uplift and inspire, but all they do is tear each other to shreds.

The show itself exists only to repeatedly force these women into shared spaces — events, parties, getaways — where the same exhausting patterns play out. After two seasons, there may be one actual friendship: Mikayla and Mayci (the latter of whom may be the only non-toxic cast member). But the relationship drama is, I believe, largely organic within the show’s manufactured setups.

These women mostly despise each other, despite the “sisterhood” they constantly invoke. One woman, Demi, even tried to boot her best friend Jessi off the show to score a bigger paycheck. And yet, the fights driving this show? They’re so laughably petty.

Case in point: There’s basically a half-season arc centered on Taylor feeling devastated — devastated — because no one publicly liked her TikTok about being a presenter at the Country Music Awards. This single grievance eats up maybe two full hours of runtime.

Example 2: Taylor tells Jessi — who owns a hairstyling business — that Demi (her own best friend) said she’d never get her hair colored by Jessi. This spirals so wildly that it ends their friendship.

Taylor and Demi, the co-villains of the season (last year’s villain, Whitney, is one of the least toxic members this season), are locked in an endless tug-of-war to take control of MomTok. Each insists the other must “take accountability,” while neither ever does. Everyone on the show acts like they’ve suffered some horrific betrayal, so much so that the actual issues in their lives (crumbling marriages, cheating spouses, fertility struggles) get sidelined by performative outrage over TikTok likes.

It’s genuinely unhinged. One woman — who comes into the season as a beloved friend — gets caught in a few harmless lies (e.g., the Jen Affleck of Mormon Wives is not actually related to Ben Affleck), and the others go after her so viciously that she drops out to take care of her mental health. She’s literally suicidal, and yet some of them still claim she’s “hiding” behind her mental health struggles to avoid “accountability” for saying her husband is distantly related to a celebrity. Who fucking cares?

Awful, awful people. Conniving, greedy, self-absorbed narcissists who talk like they were raised by YouTube comments. It’s a brutal watch — bingeing it is an act of masochism — and my only real takeaway from these latest 10 episodes is this: these women need to go back to middle school and re-learn how to communicate like human beings, while the men — who get some screentime, too — are basically lost causes, jealous spiteful ex-husbands or soon-to-be ex-husbands who can’t keep their dicks in their pants no matter how much Jesus insists! And Bret, brother: We know.