Why I'm Impressed with the "Sister Wives" Family: A Brief, Unpopular Opinion

WHENEVER I MENTION REALITY TV to my friend across the country, she rolls her eyes at me. My kid's godparents do, too. But I've been obsessed with reality television for a long time now--mostly because I feel like it's an impressive, meta-anthropological study into White people in America. Not the delicately performed captured footage of everyday White people and their six billion kids, but also the questions people don't often consider around them:

• Why are White audiences so obsessed with people who are obsessed with having children?
• What are the TLC staff thinking when they're observing these people's lives from behind the cameras?
• Why am I so obsessed with this show? And why do people compulsively assume that reality TV is trash?
• Is it really all "fake"? How are we defining "fake"? 
• How much of people calling reality TV "fake" is really a dismissal of how uncomfortable and emotionally traumatic people's lives really are?

In my experience, watching TV is like a treasure hunt: you're constantly reading between the lines to find out what's really going on. 

And what's really going on is the same thing that's going on in all of our lives: heartbreak, love, birth, death, oppression of feelings, working within the confines of ridiculous societal expectations, turning blind eyes to things we aren't sure we want to be true.

This is especially illuminating when watching conservative, religious families, because they have such a much-higher pile of shit to work through than people who have been living outside the confines of American evangelical religion, which is a whole Thing in and of itself. So the answer to my question of why I'm so obsessed with this show is simple: I recognize how my beliefs used to be the same way, and I'm interested in watching other people make similar journeys toward reconciling their beliefs with the increasingly accepting world outside those religious communities. There's a catharsis in my viewership of those stories. 
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Specifically, let's talk about the Brown family from "Sister Wives": a polygynous, Mormon-fundamentalist family featuring one dad, four moms, and a whole bunch o' kids (and now a couple of grandkids). The Browns get a lot of hate and a lot of love, which depends on the viewer's own values. And I think that's how my viewership of reality television tends to be different: I specifically push my own values out of my mindset when I watch other families. 

Source: TLC

A key part of my personality is that I tend to be extremely empathetic, and therefore I have the ability to rationalize anything. This, of course, has its good sides and its bad sides, but for the sake of this blog post it certainly is an effective trait in making me an ideal viewer for empathizing with a polygynous family. 

I'm also probably more charitable toward the Brown family than most viewers because I'm also from a pretty conservative, religious community, and I got out of it and became comfortable with myself and my beliefs. The main thing that people balk at (when it comes to the Browns) is the polygyny--the comments on YouTube are filled to the brim with people shouting at Meri (the first wife) to leave and be happy elsewhere, or making judgmental remarks about how the polygamous lifestyle is dirty and wrong, and the Browns deserve every hardship they endure because they've chosen to live their lives this way. 

But to me, this is just viewer-anonymity rearing its ugly head. This is people looking at another family and assuming that the way they run their own families is superior. So for you, viewers, as in the same breath I also acknowledge that much of reality TV (see: "Sex Sent Me to the ER," "Yummy Mummies") is indeed trash, I offer a different interpretation:

I read the family as flawed, but earnest. I see the whole family owning up to their mistakes as they can comprehend them and constantly trying to just be better people. I'm impressed at how public they are about their struggles as a plural family, and the fact that they are so honest about their jealousies and failing relationships and, later, the hard-won successes in those same relationships. You don't get into polygamy/polyamory unless you're willing to deal with those sometimes-ugly emotions and fucking up on treating your family with love and respect.

​In this way, the Browns just seem like a regular American family: a patriarch who fucks up with his language a whole lot and isn't emotionally well-regulated, â€‹but still has a whole lot of love for 

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his family and keeps trying over and over; moms who got married young and didn't totally know what they were getting into and have to cope with learning how to be moms and wives but also learning how to be PEOPLE; kids who were raised in a narrow mindset who are now learning who they are and trying to understand how they were raised with what they believe now. They're kids, and they're young adults, and they're new to the complexities of handling family relationships and your own beliefs at the same time, and that shit just comes with practice.

​And the thing that the Brown family does that constantly impresses me is practice. No matter how tough and uncomfortable things are, they practice. And they're honest with themselves and each other, when they're ready for it. They keep trying. And that's my (monogamous) family in a nutshell: fucked-up, but trying. And in those moments when we break through, it's beautiful.