Do not bear the brunt of someone else’s mistakes

Throughout the course of our lives, we are given impractical, unattainable and wrong dating advice mostly from older individuals who themselves failed to fix or leave their dysfunctional relationships. A lot of it does not work and we often end up depriving ourselves of experiencing the relationships we deserve and follow bad advice on the path to living with relationships we think are acceptable.

Last week all our social media feed was awash with news of Derrick Jackson’s (stylized jaxn) cheating scandal. At first glance, I ignored the about five posts I had seen mentioning him. I had never heard of him and did not have the time to figure out why he and his wife in her bonnet were on my timeline.

Later in the day, however, it got a little hard to ignore the posts. More and more people were posting about it, his video had gotten millions of views, memes had started popping up and people started writing think pieces about the entire situation, now I was intrigued. Who is this man? What has he done? Why does his wife look so fed up? So I went into a deep dive to figure out what all this was about. And for those that are still clueless, all you need to do is open your twitter, Instagram or google just to find out.

Outside a marriage, not much controversy surrounds infidelity anymore. It has become so normalised, relationships and marriages have taken up such different forms that the shock factor that comes with someone cheating on their spouse is almost non-existent. So, this particular story intrigued me because I did not understand why everyone and their grandmother were discussing this story.

Upon further investigation, that is, more reading, watching and listening from the blogger that broke the story initially, all the other outlets that published the story, to people I know in my personal life sharing it and finally a video from the couple themselves, I came to some conclusions as to why this burst on the scene with popularity.

This man is one of those religious know-it-all. People who hide behind the Bible while giving advice from the pits of misogyny. He is the type that will give men advice on how to exert their dominance but laced with Biblical quotes and verses and proceeds to tell women everything they are doing wrong, how they need to look and behave not forgetting all the mansplaining (the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronising). Already on this basis, people were fed up with him and were looking forward to a crack in the closet for all the skeletons to come out.

Before I go too deep into the story and recite it all here, I will cut a long story short. This gentleman was having several extra-marital affairs, each affair riddled with lies to both his wife and the mistresses involved and while this is very much none of our business, this couple decided that because they are somewhat public figures (or at least he is anyway) and there were whispers out there about it that they would film an entire YouTube video (which we later learned was indeed to spill more lies).

Focus quickly turned to the behaviour exhibited in the video, he was gripping her hand through the entire thing and not in a loving way but more in a I am not letting you go and I will squeeze your hand tighter when you go off script. This man praised himself and talked a lot about himself which came off very narcissist and the woman looked uncomfortable, empty, broken and fed up. (I detected hints of abuse, but that is a story for another day).

She still managed to come in and defend her husband and stick besides him. In a twist of events, just hours after everyone was still trying to decipher the true context of their video, this gentleman proceeds to post a reaction video of his own video critiquing himself and his wife in the third person.

Everything was odd, but what particularly stuck out to me and forgive me for the long winded way I have taken on you this journey (but I had to provide you with context) was the fact that they sat down and hashed out a plan to reveal everything to the public. I am a communications professional and the power of getting in front of a story is not lost on me at all, but the key in which this was presented came off as too personal, invasive, awkward and extremely embarrassing (especially for his wife) who tried her level best to convince all of us watching that she was in plans with him for this.

I say all this to just warn you to please never bear the brunt of someone else’s mistakes and shame. You have already been humiliated by someone who does not honour your vows. It is highly ineffective and not in your best interests for them to now use you as a prop or cushion when they face public scrutiny. It is ridiculous and brings your image out into a spotlight that was never meant to be yours.

And finally, to you men, do not be like Derrick Jaxn.