This Season's Terrible 'The Amazing Race' Couple Is Jonathan and Ana Rivera Towns

One of the weird joys of The Amazing Race is imagining how you’d handle the same challenges. I’m terrible with directions—in high school, my best friend ironically nicknamed me “Magellan”—and my wife is a relentless backseat driver. We’d probably bicker during the driving legs, although my wife has this uncanny ability to lock in under pressure and remain almost supernaturally composed in public.

Still, there’s a big difference between typical couple bickering—whether it’s married couples, siblings, or parents and children—and what’s been going on with Jonathan and Ana on this season of The Amazing Race. After 37 seasons, certain casting tropes have become expected: there’s almost always a set of twins, a gay couple that makes it to the top five (if not outright wins), and an overbearing, borderline-abusive partner. We’ve even documented it a few times here. For some reason, these couples often do well (one year, Rachel and Dave Brown actually won—and divorced soon after).

This season, that couple is Jonathan and Ana Towns. And there’s a big difference between the usual bickering and what’s happening with them. When Jonathan fights with Ana, he looks at her with pure disdain. It feels toxic. He’s been contemptuous all season, often rejecting Ana’s attempts to be supportive. It all culminated in last week’s episode when the couple fell behind. Jonathan upbraided Ana as she drove, blaming her repeatedly when they struggled. At one point, Ana called him out, saying he was being “mean,” and he shot back, “You’re a terrible partner.”

For whatever reason, The Amazing Race seems to enjoy casting couples with pre-existing marital issues (as is the case with Jonathan and Ana), maybe because high-pressure situations are guaranteed to generate drama. It certainly worked this time—after last week’s episode, Google searches about whether Jonathan and Ana divorced spiked.

They haven’t, though they have addressed their issues publicly. On their YouTube channel, Jonathan confessed that after watching himself on the show, he sought help and was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

“Looking back at what I was seeing, and knowing what I know about myself now, it’s so hard for me to be supportive and helpful to somebody when my brain is in this overheated state,” Jonathan explained in the video, noting that the race triggered his “hyperactive brain.”

“When I’m on The Race, unlike when I’m at home, I cannot control the external factors. I have no control—my routines are completely non-existent,” he added. “And we rely on—people like me rely on routines to help us regulate our emotions and control the amount of stimulus we get at any given time.”

I get that, though it doesn’t entirely explain why the insults and blame were so laced with contempt. Still, Ana remains as supportive of him in the video as she is on the race. “Especially now, knowing it’s an actual disorder, it didn’t stop you from doing well in the race. It didn’t stop you from succeeding in the race. I mean, we proved that in, you know, the legs coming up … But we just didn’t know how hard it was going to be.”

Ana has said they’re not getting divorced, and they do seem to get along very well in their YouTube videos, where the environment is more controlled (the same could be said for Vinny and Amber last season). And I get it: fights are normal in marriage, sometimes even healthy. But when there’s seething hatred behind the words, it’s different. At one point during this week’s episode, my wife even turned to our daughters and said, “If a man looks at you like that, you get the hell away from him.”

In an Instagram story, Ana didn’t claim the edit was untruthful, but she did say she’d heard from other couples that editors often excluded their many arguments, suggesting Jonathan got a villain edit. “My friend was on Amazing Race and told me that she and her husband fought the entire time and they edited out 100 percent of it. She was SO happy lol … FYI, we have heard this from COUNTLESS racers that have been on the show in the past.”

That might be true, but it doesn’t soften the impact of the arguments between Jonathan and Ana that were aired. In another YouTube video, Ana insists it’s not like that at home because their environment is more controlled, and they give each other more space. I certainly hope so.