THE WIFE GUY

May 14, 2019

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In August 2017, the twitter user @i_zzzzzz observed that: “The best days on the internet are the ones where you can refer to ‘the wife guy’ and everyone knows who you’re talking about.” This is true, and anyone who has spent enough time on Twitter will immediately know that. But why is it true? What is it to be a “Wife Guy” and why, when someone is discovered to be one, is it so funny?

In the opening passages of her essay-diary-prose poem “The Communal Mind”, an exploration of the internet as “a place we (can) never leave,” Patricia Lockwood describes entering the internet as if a portal:

“She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.

Close-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection, a garage door spray-painted with the words ‘STOP NOW! DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE!’”

Nobody quite seems to know the story behind the picture Lockwood is describing here, which dates back to at least 2013. But it became important to what was arguably the seminal Wife Guy moment: the “Email to my girlfriend’s husband,” which in 2016 was picked up and much-parodied by Weird Twitter. “I figure if I’m going to be within shooting distance of you, I better try some diplomacy before I arrive,” wrote the email’s author, @MarkusJ, who proceeded to launch into a bizarre, faux-reasonable account of how he was preparing to move 2,000 miles away with the sole purpose of carrying on an affair with the recipient’s wife. “Life is crazy, and hard, and most unfair of all, short, and these connections and emotions don’t reveal themselves every day, it’d be so self-damaging not to pursue it (my affair with your wife).” For reasons quite beyond the ken of people who do not move 2,000 miles in an attempt to sleep with other people’s wives or girlfriends, he posted the email, on Twitter, in full.

In @MarkusJ’s wake we got the Curvy Wife Guy, AKA Instagram influencer Robbie Tripp, a corny doofus given to authoring drippy, patronizing posts about how much he loves his (obviously and astronomically out-of-his-league) wife both because of and in spite of her “curvy body,” which “won’t be the one featured on the cover of Cosmopolitan but it’s the one featured in my life and in my heart.” Tripp went on to write a self-help book, which Babe.net compared to the Unabomber Manifesto. Tripp later threatened to sue them over the comparison, adding him to another pantheon of online figures: the Extremely Mad and Litigious Guy.

We also got @ElleOhHell, the Man Who Was His Own Wife, who became a semi-popular “female” comedy tweeter by using pictures of his wife as his avatar and doing jokes about getting your period, only to come clean after she divorced him. And most recently we were given ProJared, the Elf Wife Guy, a professional video game player whose wife, a professional elf, revealed he was having an affair with another professional video game player (and pigeon aficionado) after he blocked her on twitter.

https://theoutline.com/post/7426/the-wife-guy?zd=2&zi=ofvibcjg