What’s in a Wife Guy? (Derogatory)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a good wife must be in want of Posting about it. He is a Wife Guy, and there are many subspecies of him: the pioneering Curvy Wife Guy, the dramatic Cliff Wife Guy, the cheating Elf Wife Guy, and distilled in his purest form, Long Furby Wife Guy (affectionate).
(If you’re lost on the Elf Wife Guy saga: his wife was — is? — a professional elf. No, I don’t know what that means either, but I support women in STEM, aka, Sartorially Testing Ethereal Mods.)
One might rightly ask: What is so wrong with loving your wife? How could it be bad to be a Wife Guy? I mean, that Cliff Wife Guy didn’t push his wife off the cliff; he just very hysterically stated that his entire life flashed before his eyes when she fell a few feet and was completely unharmed by it. On camera, while she was crying next to him. It all felt very sincere, not at all weird or performative!
A Brief History of the Wife Guy
The Internet has given us many gifts, including the type of man whose entire personality is defined by being married and never shutting up about his wife. On its surface, this is sweet — but if you do touch grass, you might remember that in nature, rotten things often smell sweet.
Those of us unable to log off will remember Curvy Wife Guy introducing us to the concept of his people in 2017, with new types of Wife Guy dropping periodically ever since. It’s always a great day when a new subspecies makes himself known on social media, splitting the lineage down cliffs and joining in marriage with elves.
The jokes are plentiful, the memes flowing freely across platforms.
At least one courageous man has asked the question posed in the introduction to this very piece: What is so wrong with being a Wife Guy? He asked it in The Atlantic, so you know it is a brave and true question. Wife Guys LOVE THEIR WIFE, and love is a FEELING, and men are BAD AT FEELINGS, so how can being a Wife Guy be BAD???
After all, you know who loves his wife? Gomez Addams! Ah, yes, but Gomez is always telling Morticia that he loves her, not social media.
From Wife Guy (Affectionate) to Wife Guy (Derogatory)
I am sorry to this bold man and his stalwart question posed in the esteemed publication The Atlantic, but one hint of why the public collectively distrusts a Wife Guy may lie in the revelation that many of these Wife Guys turned out to be cheating on their wives. There is Elf Wife Guy, yes, but also famous men like John Mulaney, whose wife often featured in his stand-up material before their separation and his apparent affair with an actress, or former Try Guy, Wife Guy, and YouTuber Ned Fulmer, who had a year-long affair with a staff member.
Such actions lead the audience to believe that the overly performative nature of the love these guys had for their wives was because they did not love their wives that much after all. Or at least, not enough to not cheat on them with other people.
To be a Wife Guy, then, signals that you are a kind of hollow void that love and validation can never fill, even from your oft-praised soulmate. The real question to ask might be: Does a Wife Guy even love himself? Not enough to hold onto his line of stuff at Target, I guess, and there is no bigger betrayal in America than disappointing the Gods of Capitalism.
It’s also telling that so much of the audience is upset that a Wife Guy lost his brand vs. his wife — a Wife Guy’s entire brand is his wife. That takes her from being a human person with agency to being more of a concept, a commodity; things that are easily interchangeable, unlike people.
Where Have All the Husband Gals Gone?
You’ll notice, in all of this discourse, that a Husband Gal isn’t a thing. This is not because we, as a society, have finally decentered men. It’s because the general expectation for women is to center their relationships, especially on social media: the pinned post that’s of a family portrait, wedding day, or engagement photo shoot.
The anniversary posts about their soulmate/hubby/lobster, etc.
The legal name change.
Women are meant to make their relationship their identity in a way that men are not, and that’s part of why a Wife Guy makes us uncomfortable or suspicious. Why does this guy love his wife so much? Is he compensating for something, or hiding something (it turns out a lot of the time, yes). If he’s not, why is he so… lame? It doesn’t help that men are socialized to put all of their emotional eggs in their romantic basket, creating pressure that leads to unrealistic expectations for their partner.
If there’s only one person in your life you know how to talk to about feelings — or anything that isn’t sports, dragons, or IPAs (men are not legally allowed to discuss other topics in America) — what happens when that person isn’t available? If that unavailability lasts too long, do you have to go find a new wife-shaped emotional support person? It doesn’t matter why she wasn’t available (a new baby, a dying parent, or a flourishing career), only that she wasn’t and someone else was.
