On Vanderpump Rules, and When Your Boyfriend Doesn't Like You
probably oversharing a lot here
Welcome to Brianna’s Digest, a newsletter that used to be about film and pop culture but since I was laid off has become the place where I overshare about my life and my intimate thoughts. Consider subscribing, even it’s just for free, because then I have more reason to keep writing this stuff.
I had never watched any reality television before I watched Vanderpump Rules. Ok…I watched some game shows. I’ve seen Jeopardy and Deal or No Deal.. and, ok, I watched Jersey Shore in middle school. Whatever, I’m not a neanderthal. But for many months during 2023, I had friends insisting I try out the decade-long Bravo series, Vanderpump Rules, post-“Scandoval:” a seismic television event which I had the pleasure of being unwittingly privy to the moment the news broke, sitting in an Uber among my shocked pals while having absolutely no idea who the fuck “Tom Sandoval” and “Raquel Leviss” and “Ariana Madix” were. Fast forward about eight months, and I was freshly broken up with and experiencing the most crushing emotional state I had ever had the misfortune of enduring in my life. For context, I’ve never been clinically depressed, I’ve never wanted to die. As I wrote about in a previous post, I’ve spent a lot of my life being “happy” and “content with things.” I had a chaotic few years during high school and a little bit afterwards getting strung along by a severely mentally ill teenage boy who took pleasure in emotionally torturing me, and that was definitely a bit unpleasant (a story for another time?). But otherwise, I’d never been depressed, I’d never dealt with grief, I’d never been terribly low.
Heartbreak feels difficult to talk about sometimes because of how often it’s talked about. Heartbreak is everything, in everything, and everywhere. It is universally felt. It is probably the most written-on topic in the history of the universe, and if you haven’t experienced it, it’s because you will eventually. And until the last few months of 2023, I had never experienced heartbreak before either. Simply put, and without getting into any of the gory details, after my ex left me out of the blue, without any warning, my stupid ass thinking everything between us was completely fine and we were rock solid; after he left, living became hard. Existing became an effort. Waking up every day felt like something I never wanted to do when my alarm went off — going to sleep every night was, alternatively, a blessing. I wanted to turn my brain off so that the pain would not hurt as much. I had invisible ropes attached to my body pulling me back down into the earth. Things I once enjoyed were sapped of all pleasure. I was crying to the point of producing frequent dizzy spells. I made the decision to start seeing a therapist, but my journey to recovery was going to be a slow one. I needed something to distract me and help me feel a little bit better, make each day something I didn’t have to dread getting through.
Enter reality television. Before my breakup, I was one of the many ignorant snarks who believed reality television to be low-IQ entertainment; a reflection of everything wrong with culture, a signifier of base human desires. And, well, sure. But after my breakup, I needed entertainment that was easy. Entertainment that didn’t require much thought or emotional investment. I wanted exploitative drama with high stakes and big payoffs. I wanted to watch young people scream at each other, call each other bitches, cheat on each other and lie and enact various emotional Saw traps on one another. After first whetting my appetite a little with the game show Claim to Fame (which I genuinely had a lot of fun with, though I’ve never returned to), I decided it was time to give Vanderpump Rules a shot. For those uninitiated, it is a spinoff of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Vanderpump, beginning in the early 2010s and focusing on the highs and extreme lows of the sexually intertwined and varyingly deranged friend group who served at one of her West Hollywood restaurants, SUR. Lo and behold, I instantly fell in love with it.
But I ended up clinging to it for reasons aside from my desperate thirst for brainless entertainment. There is a pivotal moment during a later season confessional with Katie Maloney (my personal favorite of the VPR gang), in the wake of her separation from her husband and long-time partner, Tom Schwartz: another cast member and probably my least favorite person on VPR. Just a little backstory: throughout the show, it is obvious that Katie and Schwartz are a bad match. A couple prone to frequent, vicious fights, many of Katie’s friends are too willing to place blame onto her — and maybe some of it’s deserved, at times — when it is Schwartz who is the primary antagonist in their relationship. It is abundantly clear that neither of them is happy, it is clear that Schwartz is not really committed to Katie while Katie is devoted to him (she gives him an ultimatum to force him to marry her; he cheats on her multiple times); and it is also clear that, on some level, Katie is diminishing herself and forgoing real happiness as long as it keeps Schwartz in her life. The two of them reach a point where they have been together for so long that they don’t know what life looks like without the other person, even though they very plainly need to go their separate ways.
And, finally, Katie makes that decision for them. It is almost immediately illuminating for her in spite of the shared heartbreak of losing your partner in life of so many years. The separation requires months of (very public and televised) coping, but it is obvious just how much lighter she is in spite of the hurt. She sits down for one crucial confessional, where she admits a devastating truth to the camera: “He [Schwartz] might have loved me, but he didn’t like me.”
To be loved but not to be liked. What does that mean? Well, a month prior to my big breakup, on one August afternoon, I was airing grievances to my ex about my then-current roommate situation. This led my ex to admitting that these complaints made him nervous to move in with me, something we’d discussed wanting in the near future. I was shocked at this revelation. Why?, I asked him. Because I’m just so selfish, he answered, and that makes him sad. It upsets him that I don’t think about other people enough, that I am so fussy and so inward when it comes to my living space, and these facets of my personality make him nervous to ever live with me. I felt crushed and hurt by this. I never acted cruelly towards the roommate in question who I did not care for, I only vented privately to my partner about how they annoyed me. I am very particular about my home space, but I am different when I live with someone who I’m intimately comfortable with like my parents or a boyfriend. Still, I suddenly felt like there was something deeply wrong with me. I told him that I would work on my behavior, but I admitted to him that sometimes I questioned if he even liked me. He assured me that of course he likes me, he loves me. We’re just “different people.”
Not being liked in my relationship is something I still think I am feeling the effects of even over a year after this last relationship ended. It makes me question who I am and how I act, it makes me even more fretful towards my current partner about my behavior. It’s something I even confronted my ex about before I shut the door on him for good, yet still received assurance it was never the case. Nonetheless, I know in my heart that it was true. He never really liked me.
In the months following our breakup, I continued to think about this final argument, which I have since deleted along with our entire text thread but I don’t think I can ever forget. By my ex’s own admission, the topic and nature of the argument did not actually lead him to break up with me and had absolutely nothing to do with it. Yet as I struggled through therapy and the process of coping with heartbreak, I came to a series of revelations that I had known all along but was too scared to ever admit to myself. You see, when you’re in a relationship that isn’t good for you, it can be hard to see why that is possibly the case until after it’s already ended. A similar thing just happened to my closest friend; it makes you feel stupid, and used, and oblivious. How could I not see what was right in front of me? How did it take me so long to realize? Why was I unable to take heed of all the red flags? Why did I put up with not being treated well? Etc, etc, etc. But it takes removing oneself from the equation to see it all clearly in the end — to be on the outside looking in, a more impartial observer. It’s annoying and hackneyed to say this, but love really is the most powerful drug, and when you’re high on it it’s almost impossible to grapple with the reality of a situation. If two people love one another, then love should be enough, shouldn’t it? That’s what I genuinely used to think.
And for added clarification, this relationship was the first time I’d ever truly been in love. I had had boyfriends and “lovers” before, but I had never actually been in love with someone who I felt truly saw me, someone who I considered to be my best friend, someone who I felt I could be my complete, authentic self around. In the past, there were always walls that I put up around myself with guys who I was dating for the wrong reasons, and because of that I believed myself to not be a romantic at all. I often recoiled at affectionate, non-sexual touch, I sneered at pet names, I never wrote or said anything wishy washy for anniversaries or Valentine’s Day. It took falling in real, bona fide love to finally realize that, oh, yes, I actually love love, I am a hugely hopeless romantic. I had just been convincing myself to date guys that I didn’t really like all the much, probably because I just enjoyed the attention (and even more-so because they did make me laugh; I am, above all the other possible tastes that I may have in men, a huge sucker for a guy who makes me laugh). But I knew I was really in love for the first time when the me that I tend to keep hidden from other people was finally allowed to be free around someone without judgement, and with someone who even felt similar to me in that respect. I thought that I had finally found my person because of the ease of vulnerability and the passion of the emotional connection.
And because of all this, I overlooked a lot of things. I pushed past the red flags; I said to myself, “we’re in love, we’ll be together forever; so we’ll just deal with any problems at a later time.” It is INSANE to me now to look back on that line of thinking, because… what the fuck? If we were having problems now, there wasn’t going to be a later time. And my relationship was nowhere near as long or as volatile as Katie Maloney and Tom Schwartz’s, but I saw some similarities at a much larger scale. Notably, not being liked.
You might be thinking to yourself: how can someone love you but not like you? It’s hard to articulate, but it’s very real, and in the case of Schwartz and Katie it is evident that they have been together for so long and have respectively grown in such a way that whatever initial spark they shared between them is the only thing that they’re still coasting on. They’re together because of something that no longer exists between them, and honestly maybe it never did (there is a mention at one point in an earlier season about how their relationship was even worse in the early days). Schwartz spends too much time actively acting against his wife’s interests, rarely ever standing up for her (especially if it’s against one of his friends, or any man, really), putting his friends before her, excusing people who disrespect her, and generally just acting like he does not like her personality. These obvious behaviors towards Katie are why Katie can act like such a crazy bitch sometimes. It’s not an excuse for some of her own behavior, but it explains why she is prone to lashing out. The love that they share between one another is like a ghost.
And, well… I could relate. I don’t believe that my ex is nearly as shitty of a guy as Tom Schwartz, but after he left me I did suddenly feel….less agitated all the time. I would pick spats with him over totally trivial bullshit, but it was because I often felt insecure about parts of my personality and my interests. This was usually under the guise of teasing, but as our relationship went on, it didn’t feel like teasing anymore, and criticisms about other people’s tastes hit a little too close to my own. It just felt like bald-faced criticisms, things that were maybe annoying sometimes but were fundamental to who I was. Couching these eventually blatant criticisms into “we’re just different people” felt like the closest he’d ever get to admitting he didn’t really like me. I thought of Katie shrinking herself for the sake of her love for Schwartz, only finally blossoming into her truest self after she decided to divorce him, and I realized that I had been doing the same for a year and a half. I realized that we had been coasting on the hallucinogenic fumes from the initial passion of our first meeting. I am surely not a perfect person; there are absolutely things about my personality that I could stand to be more aware of — and I try to. But at a certain point, I am who I am. There are things about me that suck. There are things about everyone that suck. There are things about my ex that definitely suck. As people we are both our flaws and our strengths, and we have to find someone who loves all of it anyway.
I’m not writing this to bash on my ex — I even feel a little guilty to be so revealing here. I’m actually sure a lot of people reading this probably know who my ex is, yet at the same time, these are the consequences of dating a writer: you’re probably going to get written about in the end. So to be clear, I’m not writing this to reveal him as some horrifically cruel person, because he isn’t. He’s just a guy who was in a relationship that was never going to work out, with a girl who wasn’t a good fit for him, and its conclusion manifested in the way that it did because it was going to end sooner or later. I don’t regret dating him or loving him, because ultimately, as most relationships that end do, it disclosed more little truths about love and connection that you only learn once you try and fail, and then try again. Like with Katie Maloney, sometimes you only understand what you are worth once you endure something that isn’t worth it.
In my final, brief interaction with my ex, I expressed to him a variant on the feelings that I just wrote down in this very blog. I explained that I believed the ardor of our first few rendezvous coupled with the long distance between us to have clouded the reality of our connection, that he had originally believed me to be a person that I’m not under the haze of infatuation, and that he didn’t like who that person really was when he finally got to know her. He assured me this was never the case; I believe that he believes this to be a fact. But I know it’s not the emotional truth. And I know it’s not the truth because I now know how it feels to be loved by someone who likes you, who sees both your honest vulnerability and your ugliness and says “I love all of it because it is you,” and I couldn’t have found it without trying and failing, and then trying to love again.