‘Who TF Did I Marry?!?’ Rings in TikTok’s Midlife Crisis Era

“Who TF Did I Marry?!?,” the TikTok consumer Reesa Teesa’s account of her relationship together with her ex-husband, is a narrative for grown-ups. Over the course of fifty movies, in a monologue topping six hours, Reesa methodically unspools her ex’s internet of purported lies. She provides him the code-name “Legion.”

Legion, she says, claimed to have a managerial job at a condiment firm, well-stocked financial savings accounts and approval to purchase an organization automotive. He promised her a brand new home, recent home equipment, a visit overseas. In the long run, she says, none of those suburban comforts materialized.

The small print of Reesa’s marriage are weird and outrageous, however its client panorama is acquainted. It’s an account of midlife — its markers of success and the disillusionment that units in once they fail to reach. It’s maybe the primary blockbuster of TikTok’s middle-aged period. The opening installment alone, posted on Valentine’s Day, has been considered greater than 37 million occasions.

Ryan Broderick, in his internet-focused publication Rubbish Day, analyzed current knowledge on TikTok customers and located that, regardless of the app’s fame as a platform for dancing minors, it’s more and more a den of millennials, a cohort born between 1981 and 1996. I’m one in every of them, and we’re getting outdated. Almost 40 % of TikTok’s viewers is now made up of 30- and 40-somethings, and its content material is maturing to go well with our obsessions, too.

The story begins in March of 2020, when Reesa, a lady in her 30s dwelling within the Atlanta space, matches with Legion on Fb Courting and Hinge. He shortly strikes in together with her (a timeline superior by Covid’s unfold) and so they spend a lot of their early relationship test-driving automobiles that they are going to by no means personal and touring open homes they are going to by no means occupy.

Legion’s purported lies concern the bureaucratic administration of a suburban life-style: He reveals her screenshots of financial savings accounts, a replica of a mortgage preapproval, memos from human assets. His lies have paperwork; somebody is at all times printing one thing out. Simply as Reesa begins to suspect that Legion is deceiving her (and that is the place the story actually embraces its growing older demographic), he’s unexpectedly bedridden, sidelined by an outdated knee damage.

Like many different viewers who popped off within the feedback sections, I noticed the collection as an escape from my very own home life, listening by means of headphones as I folded laundry and cleaned up after my youngsters. Many movies deep, it began to really feel as if I used to be watching an excruciatingly trustworthy model of a real-estate actuality present, one during which the potential purchaser is led by means of the paces of residence acquisition solely to find that the deal is simply past her grasp. Reesa says that Legion would narrate each a part of the home hunt to her — he spoke of an all-cash supply, a house inspection, a scheduled shut — earlier than it inevitably fell aside on the final second. These actuality reveals characterize unreal fantasies, too; Reesa’s story simply makes that specific.

As Reesa drifts together with Legion’s unreliable narration of their shared life, she drills into the specifics of his home mirage. Reesa data lots of her expansive monologues whereas driving in her automotive, however she has a terrific recall for details, and her installments are lush with particulars.

One of many charms of her story is its density of brand name names. Reesa doesn’t inform us that she and Legion picked out furnishings for his or her nonexistent home; she tells us that they picked out furnishings at Rooms To Go, Ashley Furnishings and American Signature for his or her nonexistent home. They put holds on home equipment at Residence Depot and Lowe’s. They ate at Purple Lobster and the Cheesecake Manufacturing unit. They check drove BMWs, Audis, Jaguars and Land Rovers.

At the same time as Reesa begins to doubt Legion’s largess, she is briefly buoyed by these shut encounters with client purchases. She tells us about paging by means of pictures of properties on Realtor.com and Zillow.com. (“I might see myself dwelling there,” she says of 1 place. “I might see myself cooking there.”) She hunts on-line for a BMW with actual specs: a darkish blue X5 with a cognac inside. One afternoon, Legion tells her {that a} new Audi shall be delivered to her residence between 1 p.m. and three p.m., however the automotive doesn’t present. She is at all times dwelling on this window, ready for her promised life-style to lastly seem.

Finally, Reesa’s story veers towards an uneasy conclusion. When she lastly confronts Legion and kicks him out of her residence, she says, he strikes into his automotive. And when he returns to the home to assert a few of his issues, he’s arrested over an excellent warrant, and his automotive is repossessed. The person who promised her the world is left with nothing, and shortly, he’s uncovered in every single place: Because the collection unfolded, web sleuths raced to uncover Legion’s true id. A couple of days in the past, Reesa posted an replace to concern some clarifications that Legion’s brother requested that she relay to her now massive viewers. Legion was recognized in childhood, the brother informed her, with bipolar dysfunction and schizophrenia.

Compressed into its naked plot factors, Reesa’s story is a miserable anecdote about psychological sickness, homelessness, incarceration and American capitalism. However stretched into 50 elements, it’s simple to be seduced by its front-loaded fantasy particulars, its accounts of S.U.V. fashions and kitchen islands, which knit collectively into an epic client fairy story. In the long run, social media managers for a succession of manufacturers — Hilton, Delta, BMW — arrived in Reesa’s feedback part, creating buzz for his or her firms by hinting that they may ship her a prize. On Thursday, Reesa posted one other video extending her saga: She’s nonetheless ready on that BMW.