Toxic Friendships and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

I finished watching “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” on Hulu over the weekend and I figured I’d share my thoughts. There are a few interesting story lines that are worth discussing. For example, how sexuality is viewed by the church and Utah culture in general, the divide that can come because of religion but also because of the immoral actions of friends, and how much control/boundaries is healthy in a marriage. But for the sake of this blog, and because it is the focal point of the show, I’m going to talk about friendship. Especially, all of the horrible things the women in this show do that create toxic friendships.

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A few years back I discovered Mom Tok, mainly just Taylor Frankie Paul and her two blonde “daughters” Miranda and Camille. I’m close friends with Camille’s husband Sam and I must admit the first time I saw one of their videos I died laughing. What I appreciated most was that they were helping break the stigma around sexual shame and the church that I grew up in. I wanted to have Taylor on my podcast to further explore her thoughts around it and show that you could be a great member of the LDS church and still be in your sexuality. It is comical how badly my idea backfired. A week after the podcast dropped, the scandal broke about half of Mom Tok being swingers. This proved, stronger than ever, why families and marriages need to keep sexual things in-house and sacred. Hell, I think it even changed a lot of my own views around the subject. The scandal broke and so too did all the friendships around the group. For the record, I have met a lot of people that have opened up their marriage. Long term, I have never seen it work. Not one time. Granted, most of those relationships were probably on the outs anyways, and the swinging was a last-ditch effort to save it, but still, just get the divorce. Much less messy.

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Watching the show brought up a lot of emotions for me. I grew up with a very tight group of 8-9 friends and I watched the group evolve and change largely based on who stayed in the church and who left. Thankfully, the love is as strong as ever with this group and we still have deep, connected friendships, but it is definitely different. Watching this show reminded me just how hard it is to retain friendships if they are rooted in anything besides deep love and understanding.

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It's hard to say just how deep these women’s friendships were before they all grouped up to bump up their social media profiles and make videos for each other. But I saw some horrible friends on the show, and since my whole men’s group is about teaching men how to connect on a deeper level and create lifelong friendships, I thought it would be worth it to point out some of the horrible friend behaviors from the show. My hope isn’t to embarrass these women—the show does plenty of that—my hope is to give some warnings and teach some lessons so that we can all look at our own friendships and be better friends to those we love.

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Lessons on how not to be a friend…

1. You can tell right away that Taylor is the Queen Bee and most of the rest of the girls are trying to get what they can from the group without pissing her off too bad. Taylor needed a few friends to love her enough to have tough conversations. This is my favorite thing about my friends, the number of times they helped me see my own bullshit and tell me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to. Love people enough to have tough conversations. These women talked about Taylor to everyone but her.
2. These women are constantly talking badly about the other women when they aren’t there. Saying things to make them look and feel bad. The rule on this one is pretty simple: if you wouldn’t say it with them in the room, don’t say it when they aren’t there. “Real friends talk shit to your face but defend you to the death behind your back.”
3. One of the women puts several of the other women in a horrible spot by taking them to a show she knew their husbands wouldn’t approve of. They put a ton of pressure on them to stay and tried to put it on the men as being insecure for not letting them go to the show. A good friend would never want you to have to choose between them and their spouse and they wouldn’t put them in a compromising position with their morals either.
4. The women are constantly driving wedges between the women and their husbands. Telling them they need to break up and pointing out all the flaws without ever trying to help the women see their own responsibility in the situation and without giving any grace to the men. Careful with these friends. They appear as if they are “helping” but really they are jealous of the others' relationships and so they have no problem trying to tear them up.
5. They are all way too self-absorbed in their own lives and their social media and they forget or don’t know how to hold space for their friends. Multiple times when a friend is going through a hard time, the women immediately turn it back to themselves and instead of trying to understand and empathize with the friend, they judge them for the emotions they are experiencing.
6. They share each other’s secrets and don’t keep things that are sacred or off limits to themselves. If you can’t tell your friend something and know that it will stay there, you have no safety in that relationship, and really, you have nothing. You can’t have deep healing without the security that whatever comes up will stay there.

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There are plenty of other examples that I noticed that made me sad for such shallow friendships. I can’t imagine watching this back on TV and feeling anything but embarrassment if I was one of the friends that acted this way. I especially felt bad for Layla and Jenn as they both seem sweet enough and seemed like they truly wanted to connect with the other girls. Taylor just makes me laugh, she really is so real and honest and even her facial expressions. She is the one girl that is always real and I appreciate that a lot. She made the show worth watching.

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I hope that any young girls watching this that have aspired to TikTok fame can see how shallow and self-deceiving that life can be. I have learned this myself over the years wanting to be friends with men that had big profiles on social media, only to learn later that they weren’t good friends, didn’t live in integrity, and created massive problems and losses in my life. I am just grateful for the friendships I have off of social media. Nothing will ever compare to a friend that you know has you no matter what. That isn’t inviting you to the party because it will help you get views or likes. We call these 3:00 am friendships. It’s the ones you know that if you called in the middle of the night, would not only pick up but would be there for you no matter what you needed every single time.

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Can’t wait for season 2!