Shit Straight Men Say: "All she had to do was follow me"
Scandoval runs deeper than just reality ratings.
Like most reality TV fans I have been fixated on Season 10 of Vanderpump Rules and the Scandoval incident.
I have been a loyal VPR fan for many years now, so when the scandal broke I was already across the main players and what made this dastardly affair so shocking — because the nature of it WAS so shocking, that it’s even got non-VPR fans captivated.
For those playing at home who don’t watch the show, there are three main players I’ll be referencing here: Tom Sandoval (cheating boyfriend), Ariana (longtime girlfriend of Tom), and Raquel (Tom’s mistress and Ariana’s good friend).
The reason this was all so appalling, was that Sandoval and Ariana, despite their differences, seemed like the most rock-solid couple on the show. They’d been together for nearly a decade, Ariana was lovingly supporting Tom through his delusional “I’m a lead singer in a covers band” era, he was about to fertilise her frozen eggs, and they had bought a house together. Ariana was also a staunch defender of Raquel, the not-so-bright-light in the wider friendship group, who often caught herself on the tail end of some bitchier behaviour from the other women.
So the betrayal of not only Tom, but Raquel, is a bitter pill to swallow. It’s a bitter pill I’ve swallowed before.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ripple effects of betrayal and cheating recently and how it impacts future relationships and friendships. Years ago I was caught up in a similar situation when I found out my longterm boyfriend had been having, at the very least, an emotional affair with someone I considered a close friend. Like Raquel, the girl in question showed no remorse. Like Tom, my previous partner came up with every excuse under the sun to avoid responsibility or accountability.
When Tom Sandoval was confiding in best mate Tom Schwartz about his relationship issues with Ariana prior to the affair news breaking, he used a number of pathetic excuses to justify why they weren’t happy, like the fact that Ariana didn’t buy paper towels, toilet paper, or stock the drawers with pens or batteries.
Yes, really.
We can all conclude that it’s not the paper towel or the batteries that matter. Tom wasn’t happy and was looking for an out. He was not feeling cared for or pandered too, so it’s easy to focus on small, trivial things than to communicate the root cause of the issue or have a harder conversation. If he had any semblance of emotional intelligence, he’d be able to articulate what the real problems were. If he had any kind emotional intelligence, he would’ve broken up with Ariana. But instead he focuses on the fact he has to do everything and he’s tired of it — like stocking pens and batteries. Exhausting! Thankfully, he can go find comfort in Raquel’s vagina, because what else is a man to do?
Tom’s victim mentality gets worse the more his lies unravel. After Ariana confronts him and absolutely decimates him, he goes back to Schwartz’s place to wallow in his victimhood. This time it’s about the fact he wanted to end things with Ariana, but she wouldn’t let him. And then all of a sudden it became her fault that she didn’t follow him when he said he was going to Schwartz’s house all those times he was actually seeing Raquel. If she just followed him, she would’ve known he was lying. That’s all she had to do to find out the truth! Not, god forbid, trust her partner of 9 years.
One of the reasons I’ve always loved reality TV is because of watching this real-life human behaviour play out. People like to look at shows like MAFS or The Bachelor or VPR as lowbrow and fake, but the narratives that happen, regardless of how they’re produced and edited, are happening to real people. Ariana is a real person who just had her whole world turned upside down. Tom is a real, walking midlife crisis. Raquel is a real, extremely concerning person who is potentially lacking any frontal lobe development.
I struggled immensely after my own version of Scandoval to separate reality dating shows from my own feelings. If I watched a cheating scandal play out on MAFS, I’d feel enraged and sick. If I watched a Bachelor love story, I’d feel unconvinced and depressed. Watching this VPR saga play out is, in some ways, a direct parallel of what I went through many moons ago. It doesn’t make me sad, or depressed, or feel overly “woe is me” as I watch it — but it did make me realise how deep the feeling of being that badly hurt lies and how I have struggled to admit that over the years.
Relationships break down all the time. People cheat often. The double whammy of a partner cheating with a friend is something so ludicrous that it sometimes feels fake that two people could ever have that much power to emotionally destroy you. It’s one of those stories, that as time has gone on, feels like a humourous anecdote, something to share at a dinner party. Even I’ve leant into it, as a performance of sorts. The Time I Walked Down The Stairs and My Whole Life Exploded. I laugh about it. People gasp, people are outraged, and people wish them karma. The story takes on a life of its own, becomes something shared between mutual friends, sometimes dressed up with new, untrue details, and sometimes it’s so distant it feels like a dream.
But it’s still something that happened. It’s easier to poke fun at it, than to remember the visceral feeling of it. The feeling of my heart in my stomach, standing at the bottom of the stairs in some pathetically childish cupcake pyjamas, staring at someone I thought I knew inside-out and seeing a stranger coldly stare back at me.
It’s not the cheating. It’s never really the cheating. It’s the fact you can hand over a piece of yourself to someone, the most vulnerable parts of yourself, and have them discard you like expired milk. It’s the fact that you can be having a wine with your friend and be confiding in her about being scared your boyfriend is falling out of love with you, and have her smile sweetly at you while messaging him behind your back. It’s the fact, that when it all explodes, the blame is turned on the person who has been hurt the most. “Who else was I meant to take? You couldn’t come anymore,” my ex said to me when I confronted him about taking my friend to a concert we were meant to go to, mere days after breaking up. “All she had to do was follow me,” Sandoval said about cheating on his girlfriend of 9 years.
In the aftermath of the explosion going off, your friends and family rally and hold the anger for you. And then you assess all the warning signs you missed, grieve the loss of the people you thought you knew, and grapple with the fact that many years of your life felt like an entire lie. There’s therapy, there’s a gym routine, there’s new jobs, new friends, dating, new crushes, and then you’re at those dinner parties, laughing heartily at the story of your life as though it was an actual TV show, a forgotten season, and not something that has shaped so many moments moving forward.
There’s a lingering part of you — despite the bravado, despite the laughs, despite the rolling of eyes that two people could be so emotionally depraved — that will always be standing at the bottom of the stairs, feeling the sting of a betrayal in the early hours of a cold Monday morning, questioning how you got it so wrong.
It’s taken me years, but I’m not actually the victim in my own version of Scandoval and it’s a victimisation I can no longer entertain when moving my romantic life forward. I was collateral damage, maybe. But it takes more than a lying, cheating spouse and a deranged fake friend to crumble a relationship. I played my role, and I should’ve left sooner. I see it now as being set free, and I think of Ariana now as being set free too.
No longer does she have to pretend to fangirl over a man having a midlife crisis singing off-key ‘80s songs. No longer does she have to dull her shine and career ambitions to support and egomaniac who named two bars after himself. While she’s profiting enormously now off Scandoval (as she deserves tbh), fresh in the hurt and betrayal, the hardest days will still be ahead as she disentangles her own identity and grapples with the fact someone she thought she knew in and out for 9 fucking years could do this. And she has the pressure of the whole world watching her. It’s easy for people to see you thriving or “glowing up” post-breakup, but people also don’t see you when it’s quiet at home and the noise and distractions have stopped, and you’re left wondering if that was meant to be your only love story.
I cannot even fathom what the reunion will bring, but I can’t wait to pour one out for the worm with a moustache and all the other worms like him.
As Britt would say: