Just Enough Information to Be Dangerous
If anyone knows me, they know this about me:
I love reality TV.
I’m a devoted Bravo loyalist.
I’ll defend the Kardashians without shame.
I sing along to American Idol.
And I’ve absolutely imagined myself racing around the world on The Amazing Race more times than I’d like to admit.
So my entry point into The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives was actually pretty innocent. I had just finished cheering Whitney on during Dancing With the Stars this season and like a lot of people, I was genuinely bummed when she was devastatingly voted off. I liked her. I was rooting for her.
End of story.
Or so I thought.
Then she went on Call Her Daddy.
And suddenly my entire understanding of who she was — and where she came from — flipped. I had no idea what her origin story was. I had no idea what #MomTok even meant. And within about fifteen minutes of that interview, I knew I needed the backstory. All of it. Immediately.
So I did what any reasonable person would do and jumped straight into The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
What shocked me wasn’t just the content.
It was the reaction.
Watching the show, and then watching the internet watch the show, I couldn’t stop noticing how intensely people were reacting to individuals they don’t actually know. The certainty. The disappointment. The loyalty. The outrage. The way people spoke as if they had been personally wronged… or personally represented.
People weren’t just reacting to behavior.
They were reacting to meaning.
To who they thought these women were.
To what they stood for.
To the stories they’d already built in their heads.
And what made it even more fascinating was seeing how those reactions landed on the people in the show itself. How it affected them differently. How some leaned into it. How some seemed blindsided. How some internalized it. How some pushed back.
It’s wild to watch in real time.
And it clicked for me that this isn’t really about reality TV at all. It’s about how quickly we form emotional relationships with partial information and how personal those relationships feel once we’ve invested in them.
We do this everywhere now.
We interpret.
We project.
We attach.
Reality TV just makes it louder because the feedback loop is public and immediate.
What stayed with me wasn’t whether anyone was right or wrong.
It was how human the whole thing is.
We’re meaning-makers.
We decide who people are based on what we see.
And when the story changes, it can feel strangely disorienting, for the audience and the people living inside it.
Watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives felt less like watching a show and more like watching a mirror of various realities. How quickly we fill in gaps. How personally we take things. How confident we are in stories built from fragments.
Which, honestly, just made it even harder to stop watching.
What I keep coming back to is how easily we form relationships with whatever gives us just enough access to feel close. A show. A platform. A story. A screen. A glimpse. We fill in the rest ourselves, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with confidence, sometimes with far more certainty than the moment can actually support.
There’s something deeply human about that impulse. The desire to understand, to connect, to make sense of what we’re given. We don’t like gaps. We don’t like unfinished narratives. So we step in and complete the story, even when the information was never meant to carry that much meaning.
Watching all of this unfold made me realize how often I do the same thing in my own life, not because I’m careless or dramatic (okay, yes to the dramatic), but because I’m relational. Because I notice. Because I care. Because I’m wired to look for context and tone and intention, even in places that were never designed to offer them.
And maybe the work isn’t to stop doing that entirely.
Maybe it’s just to notice when I’m filling in space that was always meant to stay open.
