It all started with Elon Musk’s black eye.
In May, the US president’s on-again-off-again best friend appeared in the Oval Office visibly bruised. He laughed it off and said his five-year-old child had done it.
The internet had other ideas. Soon, a round of extremely unconfirmed speculation began about an alleged – and I cannot stress the word “alleged” enough – throuple: Musk; Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and his wife, political adviser Katie Miller. The Democrats even weighed in with a post of an empty hotel room chair, a notorious signpost of cuckoldry.
I’m not alone in finding perverse joy in other people’s relationship dramas. Reddit’s crowdsourced advice sections, particularly r/relationships and r/amitheasshole, have long been staples of viral posts. They’re portable soap operas – or in some cases, sitcoms – with the added spice that they’re (probably, sometimes, maybe) real.
The Musk-Miller saga led me to r/openmarriageregret, a subreddit mining and reposting threads from other relationship and polyamory boards for cautionary tales of open relationships gone wrong. Maintaining a relationship with another human being contorts us into new ugly shapes. Maintaining a relationship with two or more other human beings can break us apart.
The page opens with a sober preamble: “Life is about choices. Some we regret, some we are proud of – and some will haunt us for ever.”
It’s all very “don’t try this at home”. Sure. This is for educational purposes.
Many posts are as you’d imagine: a man pressures his wife into an open relationship and is then shocked to discover that she’s a sought-after 10 and he’s sexual kryptonite. But things can get so much worse.
One user asks if they’re in the wrong “for leaving our honeymoon because my husband and his boyfriend kept leaving me and my girlfriend out”.
Another writes of a very contemporary woe: “My husband wants to open our marriage for his AI girlfriend and says it’s the next step in their relationship.” Her partner has been acting distant lately, she says, spending a lot of time on the phone, smiling to himself, hiding away in the home office. Then he says he has something to tell her. Is he having an affair?
No. It’s far worse. The user continues: “He told me he wants to take the next step with her.” This involves introducing the AI to their children. “How do I stay married to someone who’s half emotionally checked out of our life and into a fucking chatbot?”
In the comments, several people share their experience of male partners becoming enamoured of a simulation of a woman who doesn’t talk back and is programmed to think everything he says is brilliant.
The voyeurism of the group is twofold: of course the relationship dramas are engaging. But so are the way people discuss these real scenarios. The commenters bring their own baggage and bias, perhaps not realising they’re part of the drama themselves. The group’s diehards subscribe to one central thesis: that those opening their relationships want novelty and attention, and the person who provides this is functionally irrelevant.
The thesis, of course, doesn’t necessarily hold water. As much as non-monogamy continues to rise, we’ve been gawking at successful open arrangements for decades. Not that it matters to the group’s frequenters, who forge forward in their cynicism, however misinformed. “I know absolutely no one in an open relationship or marriage,” says one user, who is in the top 1% of commenters in the group.
I know, by my slightly unsettling investment in the group, that I’m complicit. But I can’t look away. Who are these commenters? Who hurt them? Why are they so devoted to other people’s romantic dramas, their crumbling marriages? Why am I? The emotional zing of gossip is strong. Even the usually humourless Democrats are in on it.
So, putting ill will to one side: I truly hope the alleged Musk-Miller polycule patch things up. Alleged! I mean alleged! They’re made for each other.