Wife of Wife Guy
In case you missed it, Mark Zuckerberg commissioned a statue of his wife. On August 13th, Zuckerberg posted on Instagram: “Bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife,” alongside an image of a 7-foot tall, Tiffany blue and platinum sculpture of wife Priscilla Chan. Chan’s likeness is captured mid-stride, hair and robe flowing behind her—as Hyperallergic’s Rhea Nayyar notes, in a pose reminiscent of John Gast’s Manifest Destiny—while Chan herself, bathrobe clad, stands next to her doppelganger, sipping from a matching blue-green mug. “The more of me the better? <3” she commented on Zuckerberg’s post.
The post, like all things on the Internet, was met with a mix of inanity and adulation. One profile commented, “Husbands everywhere are shaking.” An account simply called @girls wrote, “Get yourself a man who makes sculptures of you.” Of course, detractors argued that the statue was a grotesque display of Zuckerberg’s wealth—though an Instagram page called @wealth declared that the statue would “be in a museum one day.” New York Times reporter Mike Isaac wrote, “Wife guy level: Advanced.”
With the post, Zuckerberg established himself as one of a long line of famous men who make ostentatious displays of love for their wife part of their public persona. “Wife Guys” have existed throughout history, but the official title came into vogue in the late 2010’s as the offspring of a heady amalgam of millennial quirkdom and post-90’s girl-power heterosexuality. As public celebrity shifted and a new generation of men stepped into the public eye, “Wife Guy” became the title for men who not only have wives, but who define themselves around vocal, persistent, and public displays of their love for those wives—think Instagram bios that read “[Wife’s name]’s husband”; think standup bits about strong, assertive wives standing up for meek, people-pleasing husbands at the airport, or the DMV; think giant, blue-green statues of wives in flowing, wing-like silver robes. The Wife Guy was a new kind of man, a bright, humble man, who didn’t need to assert masculine dominance—his cool, strong wife would do it for him. He was a man who stumbled upon fame, not a “leading man” so much as an accidental hero, who would attribute his success to his wife, citing the adage: “behind every great man is a great woman.” At least, that’s what he’d say to the public.
Then, in 2021, a series of public Bad Husband Behavior put the Wife Guy in a new kind of spotlight. First, Adam Levine was outed for sexting an Instagram model while his wife Behati Prinsloo, who starred in his “Girls Like You” video, was pregnant with their third child. Days later, news broke that Try Guy Ned Fulmer, who was known for his constant references to wife Ariel, was having an affair with a producer on the show. Alongside a burnout on parasociality following the pandemic, general distrust of Straight White Cis Men™, and pop culture turn toward pseudo-feminist misandry, the scandals were the final death knell. The Wife Guy had fallen.
In the years following, we hadn’t heard much from the Wife Guy. Heterosexual partnership, while always in demand, became subject to new scrutiny; now there were Instagram accounts dedicated to freeing women of their toxic ex or calling out creeps on Hinge, accounts about blasting celebrity men for suspected cheating. And all the while, Wife Guy content fizzled. Then, the very same day that Zuckerberg hard launched his new Wife Guy persona with his wife statue, Annamarie Tendler released her memoir Men Have Called Her Crazy. Tendler, former wife of Wife Guy John Mulaney, entered the public eye as a frequent subject of Mulaney’s numerous autobiographic comedy sets—bits about Tendler’s love for Timotheé Chalamet, about her assertiveness, her friends, her desire to marry, their shared dog Petunia. “My wife is Jewish. She’s a New York Jew. I did it!” Mulaney crowed in “Comeback Kid,” his 2017 standup special. In his following special, he announced: “She’s a dynamite, five-foot, Jewish bitch, and I like her so much.” With his frequent references to Tendler, Mulaney became the poster boy for the ideal, modern husband—a gentle man, non-normative in his masculinity, one who doesn’t want to interrupt his wife’s career by forcing her into motherhood, one who prioritizes wit over muscle, one who clearly, vocally loves his wife. So, all the more painful was the fall when Mulaney and Tendler announced their divorce in 2021, followed four months later by Mulaney’s announcement that he was having a baby with actress Olivia Munn.
Tendler put the onus on Mulaney for their divorce: “I am heartbroken that John has decided to end our marriage,” she announced in a statement, making it clear that it was the Wife Guy’s idea to leave his wife. The next year, Tendler released a series of self-portraits and still lifes, “Rooms in the First House,” taken in the house that she and Mulaney had purchased together during lockdown. The portraits, published while gossip pages and social media filled with images of Mulaney’s new, happy partnership with Munn, are piercing: images of Tendler injecting hormones to freeze her eggs juxtaposed against pictures of Munn’s pregnant belly, Tendler alone at a dining table while Mulaney and Munn conduct red carpet appearances. One photograph titled “Lilith,” after the Jewish demoness built to be Adam’s first wife but who instead was ejected from Eden, captures a piece of paper, half-sheathed in a typewriter, that reads: “Is there a place for me where I do not feel stifled by men or is it my fate to live alone, far beyond the outskirts of Eden?”
It’s an apt question for a woman whose public image has been almost entirely defined by her relationship to a famous husband. Tendler herself has described her connection with Mulaney as “the one single thing that people might know about me”; it’s likely that most of us would never have seen Tendler’s art or read her book if she wasn’t Mulaney’s ex-wife. Tendler’s memoir has gotten attention, but most every review identifies her in relation to Mulaney, noting that some will be disappointed to find no mention of Mulaney in the text. Even in her attempt to tell her own story, she can’t seem to escape the imprint of the Wife Guy who brought her into the public eye.
It's easy to overlook the experience of the wife herself as an extension of her husband’s image. For what is the wife of a Wife Guy if not a trophy, an asset to her husband’s brand? Chan, a pediatrician who met Zuckerberg at a party her freshman year at Harvard, is certainly talented—but her public image is tied, statue-like, to Zuckerberg’s success. Chan is known for her philanthropy as part of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, redistributing the couple’s Facebook fortune; the two notes under her “Personal Life” section on Wikipedia are about her marriage to Zuckerberg and the statue he commissioned of her in August. Her Forbes profile opens: “No longer just known as Mark Zuckerberg’s wife,” but mentions nothing beyond her collaborations with Zuckerberg and their shared children. It’s hard not to feel like these women are being placed in the lineage of the Republican Mothers, the women whose education was promoted solely because an educated woman will raise educated sons; it’s hard not to feel like no matter who these women are, how talented and accomplished they might be, they’ll always be colored by the glow of their husbands.
The ancient Romans, for their part, did not view marriage as a partnership between equals. Men typically married substantially younger women chosen for political or economic convenience. Laws around gender and marriage reduced women to, as classicist Judith Hallet describes, “chattle status,” where women were seen as subordinate to their husbands and defined by their ability to comport themselves with appropriate femininity. But there were men even then who exalted their wives in the form of the love elegy, men motivated not only by adoration but by, Hallet writes, a “powerful, mischievously subversive desire to differentiate themselves. . .from existing forms of conduct.” And we’re back to the Wife Guy. The ancient Roman tradition Zuckerberg calls us to “bring back” isn’t so different from the Wife Guy of today, who shores up his goodness, his gentleness, his subversive feminism by making his wife’s image all about himself.
The mechanic of the Wife Guy, ultimately, is a mechanic of redirection, from important man to woman and back. The wife is a tool through which the Wife Guy develops his own ego. The love these women have for their partners is presupposed—of course she loves the celebrity comedian, the billionaire programmer, isn’t she lucky to have earned his love in return? The great man, here, directs our gaze, so focused on him, to instead mirror his own: look, he says, while you are seeing me, I am seeing her. But can anyone truly see someone else’s love? Can good intention be transmuted through the lens of fame? Of power? Fame inherently objectifies—everything a public figure does publicly becomes part of their job—but there’s something particularly insidious about men being celebrated for and defined by their displays of love for their wives as though being loved by a man is inherently liberating, as though for centuries heterosexual partnership hasn’t been an extension of the long arm of patriarchy into the very fabric of women’s lives, as though a man loving his wife is extraordinary rather than expected. The Wife Guy tells us to look at his woman, all while posing for the camera himself.
When my partner and I got together, I didn’t know how to metabolize his love. I had been so guarded against men’s affection, so poised to be let down. And still, he loved me. Even when I told him it couldn’t be true, that he couldn’t really know me, he had to be building me as a false idol in his mind, he tended to me daily, in all the small ways. That’s how I began to understand. His love wasn’t about pointing to me, creating me as an image and cherishing his creation. He didn’t need to give me myself. Instead, he gave me him. The partner of Wife Guy may be cherished, but what the Wife Guy gives her is the same flighty adulation that he seeks in his fame. And when he leaves, the wife he has left behind will be forever consumed by her previous role as Wife of Wife Guy.
