In Defense of the ‘Wife Guy'

The Atlantic

4 hours ago

A few Sundays ago, I was in a car ride home with my wife when the light caught her face in a lovely way. I snapped a photo, and shortly afterward posted it to Instagram with several iterations of an emoji that felt appropriate: a man smiling, with hearts in place of his eyes. I did this because I love her. My love for my wife does not exist solely online; I often express it directly to her, or talk about her in glowing terms to friends and co-workers. It feels natural—as natural as sharing my feelings about anything to the internet, in the same way I'd post about how much I'm enjoying my Twin Peaks rewatch, or the particularly good sandwich I ate on vacation.
So the first time that someone called me a 'wife guy,' I wasn't sure how to react. If you are encountering this phrase for the first time and think wife guy surely must mean 'a guy who loves his wife,' you would be dead wrong. The term, which rose to popularity sometime during the first Trump administration, describes someone whose spousal affection is so ostentatious that it becomes inherently untrustworthy. 'The wife guy defines himself,' the critic Amanda Hess has written, 'through a kind of overreaction to being married.' The wife guy posts a photo of his wife to Instagram along with several emojis of a man smiling with hearts in place of his eyes. He will repeat this sort of action so many times that even his closest friends may think, Enough already. He is so consistently and loudly psyched about being married that sirens are set off in the mind of family members and strangers alike, who wonder what shortcomings he aspires to compensate for through such enthusiastic declarations.
In a world where identity is always being performed on social media, this particular identity is clearly one to avoid. But I, a guy who loves his wife, can't help but conclude that valuable terrain is being ceded when we think poorly of the wife guy. Many men, accustomed to bottling up their feelings, are already afraid to show what's in their heart and on their mind. If some of them are actually moved to express their love publicly and unabashedly—is this so wrong?
The term wife guy is a by-product of several converging trends. On social media, millions of people have become accustomed to broadcasting what they are up to, a recurring action that eventually reduces most behaviors and traits to caricature. Do you drink a lot of Diet Coke? Watch out, lest you become a 'Diet Coke guy.' At the same time, the mechanics of social media are such that basically any identity can be created and monetized—and so thousands of people might desperately aspire to make a living by being a Diet Coke guy. Some already do.
Once a clever person recognized that 'loving your wife' was an emotion that some people were performing in notable ways, the wife guy seemed to be everywhere. There was the 'curvy-wife guy,' an influencer who made lots of content about how much he adored his plus-size wife. There was the 'cliff-wife guy,' a different influencer who posted a dramatic video about the shock of watching his wife fall off a cliff. (It was more of a short drop, and she appeared to be basically fine.) Celebrities such as John Mulaney, Prince Harry, and Ryan Reynolds turned their marriages into content, so much content. These guys wanted to be wife guys and made 'Honor thy wife' into an informal commandment for modern living. This was around the time of the #MeToo movement, in which men's scummy behavior toward women was suddenly being reevaluated across society—and the wife guy, though perhaps over-the-top, seemed to be a welcome corrective.
As more wife guys popped up, the phrase evolved. Before long, you did not have to be a public figure to be a wife guy—you just had to be a guy. And the establishment of this easily attainable personality opened it up for critique. Some wife guys didn't appear to love their wives all that much; their affection seemed a bit forced, or stage-directed, or perhaps even outright transactional. Some famous wife guys got divorced, or cheated on their wives, or began to look like they were going through the motions. The rapturous feelings they'd shown began to seem like a cover-up for some sort of unpleasant truth. 'Posting publicly on social media about your love for your spouse shouldn't be a sign of cheating,' the New York Post declared, 'but in 2022, it's an immediate red flag.' Wife guy, always a little mocking, curdled into the plainly pejorative.
Thus did my friends' casual remarks that I was a wife guy begin to feel like digs, even if they weren't meant that way.
That I, a 36-year-old heterosexual man, should love my wife does not seem like a grand surprise. I married her for love, not because of a secret desire to inherit her immense oil fortune (she does not have one) or because of an accidental pregnancy and subsequent familial pressure to tie the knot (no baby here). I met her through a mutual pal—her best friend was also my boss—and a few months later, I sat back and thought to myself, You know, I am having a tremendously good time getting to know this beautiful, intelligent, hilarious, kind, ambitious woman with great taste in movies and books and music and fashion whom all of my friends love. Within a few years, we were engaged, and wedded not long after that, a series of decisions that felt as instinctual and obvious as ordering more bread to go with my unused dip. Hence my surprise when my uncomplicated expressions of adoration started to be noticed—and judged.
Still, I understand why other people might be suspicious. When my wife and I were first dating, and everything felt so good, I could not always avoid sounding smug. 'It feels like,' I told one friend, 'we're better than every other couple.' I do not think my friends were hoping our relationship would fail, but they were unfamiliar with the emotions I was broadcasting—it probably did seem like I was putting it on, when really I was just very happy.
Obviously I know love is not about showing off how in love you are. Love contains something internal and unmeasurable that can be weighed only in private, not presented for others to observe. And in fact, when dating, I was accustomed to adopting a more defensive pose, in which I'd play it cool so that my future self wouldn't look back with regret at how I'd left myself exposed. Such is a subcurrent of the skepticism toward the wife guy: an anticipation of the moment when all this publicly performed love will collapse onto itself, and be revealed as shortsighted. I knew it, thinks the naysayer.
But falling in love, and getting married, has changed a great many things about the way I see the world, and validated other ideas that I suspected were true but had not yet confirmed for myself. Namely, that love requires vulnerability—a willingness to be naive and silly, a willingness to lay down your defenses and welcome what comes next, whether good or bad. To me, this is the only state of being worth pursuing in this life.
Of course, I'd prefer to keep multiple aspects of this alchemic process, and my marriage, to myself (for example, the level of mess that occasionally accumulates when two writers live together). But sometimes, I just want to share it with the world—even if it makes people roll their eyes. We are all performing some identity, in some way, and I can live with being a 'guy who loves his wife a lot,' no matter what nicknames it brings.