Lack of Accountability on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
As I mentioned in my blog post about Layla’s eating disorder, I just finished watching the latest season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (SLOMW) and have a lot of thoughts about many of the story lines. Today we’re focusing on Taylor Frankie Paul, the leader of MomTok who is, to put it bluntly, a hot mess. Part of what makes her such a complicated person is that, with each passing season, we learn more about why she reacts the way she does, especially around men. She’s explosive, filled with rage, and with her baby daddy Dakota, is always pushing him away but gets angry when he actually leaves and tries to date (or sleep with) someone else. The reason MomTok really blew up a few years ago was because Taylor was involved in a “swinging scandal” where she ended up having an affair with her friend’s husband, both of whom were involved in a polyamorous relationship with Taylor, her husband, and other couples. The people involved documented everything on TikTok and they ended up with the Hulu show.
Underneath the trauma of Taylor’s life publicly blowing up (granted, she chose to make everything public) is a history of chaos within her family of origin. Over the seasons, we have learned that Taylor’s mom got pregnant really young and that Taylor only met her father once, when she was four, and has always felt like she is not good enough because he didn’t stick around. Taylor blames all of her mental health problems and negative core beliefs on this, which conveniently helps her avoid the reality of her relationship with her mom. As viewers, we have witnessed numerous occasions where her mom has called her a bitch, a whore, and told her to shut the fuck up. They have always had this explosive relationship, and her stepdad has appeared to enable this, as there was an ugly episode several seasons ago where he calls her a whore for getting pregnant with Dakota’s baby. I’d say this is all toxic at best and probably impacts how she views herself and her relationships more than her absent father did, but I’m not her therapist, so who am I to say.
What really bothered me this season was that Taylor was erratic and reactive the entire time and MomTok (aka all of her friends) simply validate her anger to her face. They’re constantly telling her how awful Dakota is, which is the main reason she is upset all the time, and never really push back on her explosiveness. Mind you, Dakota and Taylor are not together and are trying to “peacefully” co-parent their son and she is screaming at him both in public and private (all on camera though) about the decisions he is making. Can you just picture, for one moment, what you might do if your friend was behaving this way? Personally, I would be trying to de-escalate the situation, which none of the moms do, and would be horrified as some of the behavior, especially when in public. In confessionals and behind her back, the moms are frustrated by her behavior, as it could impact their own business deals, but no one actually holds her accountable all season and mainly only confront her by reminding her that she could be jeopardizing her role as the Bachelorette, which will be coming out on ABC next week. As I was watching, I’m thinking - your only concern about this behavior is that she could jeopardize that opportunity? Where is the concern about the anger? How that could be impacting their son, or Taylor’s other children with her ex-husband? There was already a domestic violence incident where police were called when Taylor and Dakota first got together, and the rage is clearly trending in that direction - which proved to be true in the past few weeks. Check out this Page Six article about how filming for the new season has halted because of physical abuse allegations going in both directions between Taylor and Dakota as well as Dakota alleging that Taylor is physically abusive to their son. Now the moms don’t want to film with her, but if they had actually held her accountable over the past few seasons, maybe this never would have escalated to where it is now. To be clear, Taylor is 100% responsible for her actions, as is Dakota, but it was really shocking to see how much her friends enabled her behavior this season. Real friends push back against this kind of thing, bring you to therapy (like they did with Layla for her eating disorder), and try to bring out the best in you. That did not happen between Taylor and MomTok until things got violent. To me, that’s incredibly sad and I can only imagine the damage being done to the poor children involved in this situation.
