meme-review
What's Going On With 'Wife Guys?'
It seems like nowadays we can't go a week without learning that a seemingly stand-up husband, a man deeply in love with his wife and doesn't care who knows it, is actually a big ol' cheater. Two weeks ago, it was Adam Levine shattering the hearts of all seventeen Maroon 5 fans when it came out that he was telling Instagram models that he may need to see their booty while his wife was pregnant. Last week, Ned from the Try Guys alerted many people to his existence when it came out that he cheated on his wife after going on and on about how much he loved his wife in YouTube videos for years.
This brought forth new discourse around the term Wife Guy, as public opinion appeared to declare that the age of the Wife Guy is over (and, naturally, that Time of the Orc has come, but that's a topic for a different explainer).
But what is, or was, a "Wife Guy?" And how far has the mighty wife guy fallen? Here, we'll go through the history of Wife Guys, from their rise to internet fame to their sordid end.
What Is A Wife Guy?
If you don't understand what a Wife Guy is, there's really no better explainer than this fifteen-second clip mocking Chance the Rapper's infamous flop of an album, The Big Day.
In 2019, Chance the Rapper, ready to jump to superstardom after building a solid fanbase on the strength of three mixtapes, released his first proper album, The Big Day. While Chance was generally goofy and lighthearted on his mixtapes, fans and critics found his positivity went from wholesome to corny on The Big Day, thanks in no small part to how much he rapped about loving his new wife, Kirsten Corley. His wife raps were too cringeworthy for many to bear, culminating in the "Ooh, I love my wiIiIife" parody that is arguably the most memorable thing about The Big Day era. On that album, Chance had become a "Wife Guy."
A "Wife Guy," as it's understood online, is a man who has wrapped the very notion of loving his wife into his public brand. While there is obviously nothing wrong with celebrating and loving one's spouse, the Wife Guy does so in such a cloying way it comes off as potentially disingenuous and perhaps insidious. The Wife Guy knows that in the post #MeToo era, being a loving, doting husband is the avenue for cultural cache, thus works to demonstrate that in public, whether on social media or in their celebrity brand. Surely, no one can take offense to a man who glorifies a woman he loves so openly, right?
And so, in recent years, the internet has seen numerous men go viral for stepping on that gas pedal a little too hard, earning the internet's mockery for singing just a bit too loudly, "Ooh, I love my wiIiIife."
Where Did The Wife Guy Come From?
The idea of a "Wife Guy" can likely be traced to Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen's 2006 mockumentary was a hit at the time, but sixteen years later, its most notable contribution to culture at large is MAH WHAAAIFE. As the joke of saying "My Wife" in Borat's voice moved from funny to overplayed to ironically good again over the course of a decade, something about a guy being stupidly jazzed about his wife struck people as inherently funny. Perhaps this is due to overarching cultural concepts of masculinity and domesticity, but those are heady topics to discuss at a later date. What you need to know now is that people began finding husbands really loving their wives a humorous concept in the late 2010s.
The first notable Wife Guy online was Robbie Tripp, a man who went viral thanks to an Instagram post where he gushed about his wife's curvy body. His adulations included gems of lines like:
"For me, there is nothing sexier than this woman right here: thick thighs, big booty, cute little side roll, etc. Her shape and size won't be the one featured on the cover of Cosmopolitan but it's the one featured in my life and in my heart."
At the time, Tripp's post was praised, criticized and mocked, and while he's since gone on to brand himself as "guy who likes curvy girls," even making an entire music video to this effect, his post introduced the internet to the world of Wife Guys. Two years after his notorious post, The New York Times wrote of Tripp:
(Tripp) is pioneering a whole new online ethnographic group, one at the center of a deeply ambivalent state of heterosexual coupling in America: 'wife guys.' (The Wife Guy) is sexually attracted to his wife, and he talks about it as if he were some kind of hero. The wife guy is a mutation of the “Instagram husband,” the man who exists to take flattering photos of his wife, except that the wife guy is no longer content behind the scenes. He is crafting a whole persona around being that guy. He married a woman, and now that is his personality.
What Happened To Wife Guys?
In the late 2010s, the internet, particularly Twitter, couldn't get enough of wife guys. Over the course of a few years, the internet was treated to memes given such as Cliff Wife (in which a man made a video about how his wife "fell off a cliff" and nearly died, though viewers say it was more like she rolled down a hill) and Shredded Cheese Fajita Sad Wife (in which a man posted about his sad-looking wife mourning not getting shredded cheese on her fajitas at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic).
There were also scandals dubbed Fake Wife (in which a man revealed he'd been posing as a female comedian on Twitter for years using a portrait of his wife as his avatar) and Elf Wife (the legendary ProJared cheating scandal which truly can't be summed up in one sentence). Though not all of these followed the same "Wife Guy" template of laid out by Tripp, they owe a part of their viral success to him: by virtue of merely being wife-related, each story's viral success buoyed another, and for a time, the internet couldn't get enough of husbands making fools of themselves on account of their wives.
Why Do People Hate Wife Guys Now?
Though the "Wife Guy" had an internet golden age in the late 2010s, like all great empires, it was destined to fall. One possible catalyst for the fall of the Wife Guy came when comedian John Mulaney, long known for incorporating teasing-but-loving riffs on his wife into his stand-up routines, announced in 2021 he was separating from his wife and then got with model Olivia Munn shortly after.
The Mulaney situation elicited a host of feelings from his fans. While some were non-plussed by the situation, others felt betrayed that Mulaney had separated from his wife whom he publicly adored in his jokes.
The Mulaney situation may have been an anomaly in the Wife Guy narrative were it not for the September 2022s of Adam Levine and Ned Fulmer. That these cheating scandals happened in such proximity to each other and followed similar narrative arcs spelled the death of the Wife Guy.
Though Levine isn't necessarily known for singing about his wife, Victoria's Secret model Behati Prinsloo, he does post about her on Instagram often and has made various "Wife Guy" statements about being "married to the best woman in the world," etc. Being happily married was undoubtedly part of his public persona, and the flirtatious texts he sent to models put a significant dent in that image.
Fulmer's situation was even worse, as Fulmer actively incorporated loving his wife into his content with The Try Guys. When he was caught cheating with a subordinate at Buzzfeed, it threw away all of the goodwill he'd developed by loving his wife, making it seem gross and hypocritical in retrospect.
The Future Of Wife Guys
The 1-2 punch brought on by Levine and Fulmer's scandals seems to have killed the Wife Guy for good, and those who seek to identify will the term will probably just find themselves mocked online. No longer can a man make his brand "Ooh, I love my wiIiIife" without eliciting suspicion that he's compensating for seeking out extramarital affairs. Perhaps this is for the best. Prior to the scandals, critics of Wife Guys were already feeling sick of men centering their entire persona around performing the most basic of husbandry duties: loving their wife. With the Wife Guy dead, perhaps married men will have to put in just a little extra effort to receive the praise and adulation of others.
For more information on Wife Guys, check out our KnowYourMeme entry here.
