There’s something rather devastating about watching people who are just so completely devastated. It’s a different kind of thing than looking at cruel people acting like heathens or reckless adults behaving like toddlers whose parents have negated the advice of professionals and instead decided to see what might happen if they stopped administering the Ritalin for a couple of days. No, watching pure sadness as it unfolds across the airwaves feels morose, uncomfortable – and that was before the fake funeral transpired.
Shannon and David, both in their second season on The Real Housewives of Orange County, are stuck in the muck-filled middle of attempting to recover from David’s adultery, a terribly unfortunate outcome of a marriage that has only been presented to viewers as conflicted at it’s very best and utterly barren at it’s very worst. These are two people who earned themselves an awful lot of screen time during their inaugural season and never once exhibited a union that felt anything but scarily fraught with tension. It was David who made me feel the kind of panging anxiety that caused me to want to figure out a way to unzip my skin and then wash it a few times before pulling it back on while I was locked away in some private room, far away from his glaring eyes and impenetrable demeanor – and it was Shannon who made me wonder why she was airing her anguish to the world, especially since it seemed to consume her.
The thing is, I kind of like Shannon. She came off as pretty unstable last year, but there is a decency at her core that you can almost see if she turns sideways. She seems different than someone like Tamra, a woman who has shown off a core made up mostly of anger and the kind of bitterness that I believe is comprised of a stinging form of green bile. Shannon looked damaged, dazed, and desperate, but I still couldn’t help but wish her well.
The biggest problem currently threatening her marriage is that David had an affair and left the house for a while to be with the other woman. He’s back now and the two are fighting to save what once was or what they hope could possibly be. Shannon explains, “This country has a divorce rate of 50%…the divorce rate in Orange County is 70%,” and she doesn’t want to be a part of that and I’ll go ahead and root for the woman because she seems so positive that there’s something to save and the two of them have children, but I’ll also say that I speak from experience and there is something worse for a child than divorce: watching two people who cannot communicate with one another either scream across a kitchen like banshees or talk to one another with an inflection that makes it seem as though something unflinching and powerful is strangling each one of them from within.
I’ll return to the couple’s retreat in just a moment so we can talk about the tombstone props and how David, pretending to be dead, held his hands in the pose of a corpse like he’s had some practice, but first let’s lighten the mood (this is supposed to be aspirational escapism after all – or at least that’s how the show was intended back in the days before Andy Cohen became far more famous than any of the people who actually appear on his programs) and talk about cake.
As always, loved your recap. I have never understood “I will forgive but not forget” statement, to me that sounds more like a warning than a forgiving and I have never understood why people would go to counseling with a bunch of strangers where you are barring your soul and or heartbreak but I’m kind of socially awkward and I would certainly be awkwarder (shout out to Kristen RHONY for her use of royaler) in that type of a situation.