Voices: The Try Guys drama and what happens when a wife guy’s brand backfires

A lot of people have learned Ned Fulmer’s name over the past couple of days. Fulmer, up until very recently, was part of a group of four YouTubers known as the Try Guys. Their channel is exactly what it sounds like: videos of the guys trying things. In their first ever clip, filmed in 2014 when the guys worked at BuzzFeed, they tried on Victoria’s Secret underwear — since then, they’ve tried everything from hypnosis to stand-up comedy to colonics. The group parted with BuzzFeed in 2018, and has since evolved into a YouTube channel with 7.8 million subscribers, complete with live tours and official merchandise.

Fulmer and his compatriots — Keith Habersberger, Zach Kornfeld, and Eugene Lee Yang — could surely have gone on living their lives and working together for decades to come. But earlier this week, scandal hadn’t come knocking for the Try Guys. Allegations that Fulmer had cheated on his wife emerged online — and things only spiraled from there.

Fulmer himself confirmed the rumors in a statement he shared on social media on Tuesday, which read: “Family should have always been my priority, but I lost focus and had a consensual workplace relationship. I’m sorry for any pain my actions have caused to the guys and the fans but most of all to Ariel. The only thing that matters right now is my marriage and my children, and that’s where I am going to focus my attention.”

As for the Try Guys, they announced on the same day that Fulmer “is no longer working” with the group. “As a result of a thorough internal review, we do not see a path forward together,” they added in a statement. “We thank you for your support as we navigate this change.”

If you’re wondering why someone lost their job as a result of engaging in adultery (which is generally not great, but in most industries is not considered a fireable offense), there are a couple of connections to make here. First of all, by Fulmer’s own admission, the extramarital relationship involved someone else in the same workplace. Second of all, and perhaps more crucially, Fulmer’s wife, Ariel Fulmer, was a regular presence in Fulmer’s content – and, by extension, in the Try Guys’.

Fulmer often shared sweet photos of himself and his wife on his Instagram account, where she and their two kids were part of his brand. Online, Ariel Fulmer and others were known as The Try Wives – a spouse-centric spinoff of the original Try Guys. The couple appeared in the kind of YouTube video titled “Ned and Ariel being absolutely perfect” and “Every time Ned Fulmer says ‘my wife.’” They even wrote a date night-oriented cookbook together.

In short, Ned Fulmer was a wife guy. What’s a wife guy, you ask? It’s a good question, and  there’s even a Wikipedia page to provide an answer: “In social media,” the internet encyclopedic gods detail, “a wife guy is a man whose fame is owed to the content he posts about his wife. The term has been applied more broadly to men who use their wife to upgrade their social standing or public persona.” In other words, a wife guy is not just someone who says nice things about their spouse online every once in a while (that’s… pretty normal, and a nice thing to do.)  “Fame”, “content”, and “public persona” are the primary factors here.

This is a large part of why people have been so captivated by the recent Try Guys developments. Adultery in itself isn’t exactly breaking news. People are complicated. Relationships are complicated. More than one marriage has involved one or both partners cheating, and more than one marriage has survived. Or not! Sometimes, relationships end, and that’s kind of all there is to it. But a wife guy cheating, when part of the identity they were monetizing online was tied with their status as a devoted spouse? People are going to notice.

Perhaps the lesson in all this is that the wife guy as a concept was never going to work. Why did it need to exist to begin with? Why did the idea of a man loving and supporting his wife ever seem like a concept unique enough for monetization?

There are wife guys, but there are no husband gals, or husband ladies, or whatever else. Almost like in our patriarchal hellscape, a wife is expected to do those things, but can’t expect any pats on the head when she succeeds. (To be fair, attempts to glorify female domesticity tend to backfire quite spectacularly, in rather creepy ways, so perhaps it’s best we abstain altogether.) This is very like when dads get praised for “babysitting” their children or “helping” at home, when really they’re just raising their own kids and doing their half of the domestic labor.

The life of a wife guy is a bad deal, even for the wife guy in question: As soon as he stops being a perfect encapsulation of domestic devotion, the brand is dead. And so, the YouTube quartet becomes a trio. The wife guy is trapped in a prison of his own making, which demands he make something complicated and at times messy – marriage – as straightforward, cutesy, and marketable as possible.

As far as archetypes go, the wife guy was dead on arrival.