The gender gap has never felt so wide. Dating has become a disaster zone. Keeping relationships afloat in these delicate times requires a certain level of nondisclosure: You don’t need to share how disgusted you are by the sound of each other’s breathing and chewing. Better to spare everyone’s feelings and preserve the peace, right? Alternatively, you can make these mean confessions to each other on-camera and upload the video to TikTok.
At least, that’s what the couples jumping on the “We Listen and We Don’t Judge” trend that’s been making the rounds on the platform in recent weeks have been doing. The conceit of the videos — which you can also make with siblings, friends, and just about any other relationship you don’t mind destroying — is self-evident. One person divulges a secret to their partner, and before anyone can pick a fight or react, both chant, often in monotone, “We listen and we don’t judge,” the way a preschool classroom might recite the Golden Rule or the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the other side gets a turn.
Plenty of the resulting videos, which are probably not as off the cuff as their creators would like them to seem, are fairly innocuous, like the woman who revealed to her husband that she steals the fries out of their son’s McDonald’s Happy Meals to eat herself (“I would do the same thing,” her husband replies), or the man who tells his pregnant wife he sometimes purposefully gives her a dirty water bottle instead of properly cleaning it out. “Don’t do that, there’s bacteria,” she says, laughing, sitting beside him in pink Poppi-branded pajamas. “Wait, I can’t judge,” she corrects herself. “We listen, and we don’t judge.”
For some couples, the trend offers an opportunity to grow a little closer, a kind of dollar-store couples therapy inside the confessional box that is the internet. In one video — my personal favorite of all the ones I watched — a woman tells her partner that growing up she used to steal the offering money from church, as he looks on open-mouthed. But many other videos just make clear how much straight couples barely seem to tolerate each other, whether it’s expressed as mild dislike or simmering rage, and how comfortable they are putting that dynamic online. “I wish I could say I love it when you cook, but then I’d be lying,” influencer and mom-of-four Cecily Bauchmann’s pastor husband tells her in their video. “You don’t use any seasoning.” In a TikTok captioned “This trend ruined my relationship,” a man tells his girlfriend he felt up her aunt at Thanksgiving. “She let me cop a feel ’cause she was wearing that tight skirt, but that’s all I’m going to say,” he says. “These are supposed to be funny,” the girlfriend answers, visibly fuming.
The palpable tension in a TikTok by Janie and Dave Ippolito, married influencers whose bread and butter is broadcasting snippets of “relatable married life” to their near-million followers, is in a league of its own. Over the course of the two-minute-plus video, Janie confesses to lying about headaches just to get a break and admits her facials are actually Botox sessions; Dave says he hides in the bathroom when chaos unfolds with the kids so that his wife has to handle it solo. “Sometimes, I ignore you and pretend like I can’t hear you, in hopes that you’ll get so annoyed that you have to repeat it, that you won’t ask me to do something again,” he says in his final admission. “You’re done,” Janie replies. Performative or not, commenters weren’t impressed by the regressiveness of it all. “His are all about avoiding responsibilities,” one wrote. “May this love never find me,” said another. “We listen, and we get divorced.”
But what’s it like to actually make and post such a jarringly personal video about the state of your relationship? In their video, 23-year-old Miami-based influencer Aracelys Rodriguez sits cozily on her boyfriend Justice Cook’s lap while confessing that she doesn’t enjoy sex with him “nine times out of ten” if they’re not using a rose vibrator. (His rebuttal: “When we have a disagreement and you walk away, I stick up my middle finger to the back of your head.”) Rodriguez tells me their relationship is strong enough to stand a little content creation, and the shock factor is all part of the shtick. “The trends on platforms like TikTok and Instagram move fast, and we enjoy hopping on ones that resonate with us, but also have the potential to get us noticed,” she says. They didn’t rehearse the video, which Rodriguez said was “a mix of being real and exaggerating a little for the drama.” The vibrator comment, for instance, “was for comedic effect,” and if her boyfriend needs to stick his middle finger up every once in a while, it doesn’t bother her. “It’s a healthy form of release — who doesn’t need a little free therapy now and then?” she says. Despite the tongue-in-cheek nature of the TikTok, Rodriguez says there’s even a gender divide in how followers are receiving it. “The girls are loving it and having a good laugh,” she says. Men, meanwhile, “are not enjoying the joke as much.”
Of course, there are those couples who claim to have broken up as a result of the trend. It’s hard to know what’s the truth and what’s just for clicks, but in any case, their jabs feel too caustic to be entirely made up. “Sometimes, when I look at you, I wish you were someone else. We listen and we don’t judge,” a young woman tells her boyfriend in this particularly excruciating video. The reason she doesn’t put the I in “I love you”? “Someone loves you, but it isn’t me.” Maybe honesty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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