It’s happened. I have endured another super-dramatic season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the reality series where no marriage is safe, no womb stays empty for long, MomTok cannot go a season without at least one member abandoning the show (at least temporarily), and Taylor Frankie Paul can’t go more than three episodes without sleeping with her toxic ex and swearing him off forever. Again.
Indeed, the drama on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives — a series essentially birthed from a Mormon swinging scandal — has grown so extreme that the most interesting thing about it anymore are the relationships that are actually healthy.
At this point, only one truly healthy relationship remains, and it’s the one that, ironically, launched the whole series with something of a sex scandal to begin with.
The wreckage everywhere else is considerable. Taylor and Dakota may have the most toxic relationship on television — Taylor has essentially confessed that her ex sexting her about his own infidelities functions as something of a kink, and she very nearly bailed on The Bachelorette after backsliding with Dakota the night before she left for taping.
Demi departed the series rather than acknowledge that she probably cheated on her husband with Marciano. Jessi divulged the details behind the “Fruity Pebbles” scandal, and she and Jordan ended season four teetering on the edge of divorce — Jessi over an “emotional affair” with Marciano, Jordan over his refusal to let it go even as he exploits his own wife for clout.
Layla is navigating an uneasy relationship with Mason (the brother of another Mormon Wife’s ex-husband, Chase), managing his opinions about her parenting while simultaneously battling her own eating disorder — she finds online comments telling her to eat a sandwich affirming.
Mikayla and Jace closed out the season separated over intimacy issues. And Zac absolutely cannot handle being overshadowed by his wife Jen’s Dancing with the Stars fame.
And then there are Whitney Leavitt and her husband, Connor.
When the series began, Connor was struggling with a pornography addiction, and Whitney had learned from online comments that he’d had a Tinder profile — it remains unclear whether anything went beyond sending pictures. Four seasons later, these two have the healthiest relationship on the show, and it isn’t close.
For much of this season, Whitney — the season two villain who essentially left the series, only to return in season three when it offered her a shot at Dancing with the Stars — managed to stay above the fray. She kept her focus on the competition and, where time allowed, on quietly repairing her relationships within MomTok.
What we didn’t see was what was happening behind the scenes at DWTS, where Whitney and Jen’s relationship was, by Jen’s account, distant-but-cordial — though Whitney characterized it differently. The détente collapsed the week of Jen’s elimination, when Jen declared Whitney’s friendship fake and transactional.
Everything Whitney had been holding back over the course of the season came out at once, and she crashed out on Jen so thoroughly and (I’d argue) so justifiably that Jen, after her elimination, posted a video essentially urging her followers not to vote for Whitney. (Whitney made it to the semi-finals. She was easily a top-three dancer.)
The bitter irony is that Jen’s husband Zac spent the season drowning in his stay-at-home dad duties, guilting his wife for not prioritizing him or their children during her DWTS run, and openly balking at her desire to move to Los Angeles and pursue an entertainment career — threatened, it seemed, by the simple fact of his wife being the breadwinner.
At some point, Zac sought out Connor for advice. And Connor, bless him, modeled exactly what the right answer looks like: he quit his job in venture capital to support Whitney full-time, took over childcare without complaint, and effectively made being his wife’s biggest cheerleader his entire job description. To keep some sliver of his own identity in the process, he picked up a hobby. Close-up magic, specifically.
Dorky? Absolutely. Charming? A little, yeah.
Connor never appears threatened by Whitney’s success. He doesn’t resent the role reversal. When Whitney felt guilty about not being a full-time mother, he supported her through that guilt rather than weaponizing it.
And when the other husbands launched DadTok — ostensibly their own platform, but really just a way to hitch a ride on MomTok’s visibility (and, possibly, to cheat on their wives at the Vanderpump Villa) — Connor opted out entirely. He was happy to offer advice to those who asked. He had no interest in coasting on his wife’s fame.
This is the arc the show rarely bothers to tell: the guy who came in as the cautionary tale, the husband with the addiction and the Tinder profile, who did the work quietly and without an audience, and who is now the only man in the entire ensemble whose marriage looks like something worth having.
Connor has redeemed himself, and he and Whitney stand as the sole flicker of hope in a sea of relationships that seem to be disintegrating in real time — on camera, for our viewing pleasure.
