why so many female influencers end up divorced

jen hamilton is not the first, nor will she be the last

Last night, my phone started buzzing, and my group chat lit up. “Did you see this video??” I clicked on the now-deleted video to find Jen Hamilton sobbing on screen, and while she did not directly say she and her husband were splitting up, it seemed to be the overwhelming implication. I didn’t follow Jen on TikTok and am not someone who has followed her content closely, but people sent it to me because she is local and we have frequented the same Facebook mom groups for years, long before her internet fame. I do not know Jen, but we have met and have many friends in common, as we do not live in a major metropolis.

The little bit I know about Jen is that she is a fantastic nurse, an author, a mom, and a hilariously talented videographer. She also founded a nonprofit several years ago called The Hot Mess Express, which helps struggling moms clean and organize their homes, with no judgment, in what they call “rescue missions.” I briefly met Jen after I had a viral tweet about it a couple of years ago. Jen is a bright penny, shiny and magnetic, and even locally, I have never heard anyone utter a bad word about her. But as she grew in her success, I wondered how long her marriage would last.

Now, you may wonder if this is because I have some kind of special insight into her relationship, and I don’t really. But I have seen this film before. I obviously don’t know exactly what happened in every single female influencer’s marriage, but I've seen a pattern play out. A woman starts writing or posting online and builds a platform, often by accident. Their success begins to overtake their husband’s, at times even financially, and the husbands can’t stand it. They can’t stand how well-known, successful, and beloved their wife is. They are no longer Travis Kelce, they are “Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.” And while there are men like Travis or Colin Jost who lean into it and seem happy to be the arm candy to their more successful partners, some men simply cannot take it. For them, it’s emasculating. Matty Healy, an ex-boyfriend of Taylor Swift’s, said this very directly.

”And the reason I mention that is because if I had [properly] gone out with Taylor Swift the first thing I would’ve [thought was] ‘Fucking hell I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.’ You know, FUCK. THAT.” Then he had added an afterthought: “That’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing.”

I listened to a podcast episode a few years ago with Jen Hatmaker, Kristen Howerton, and Jamie Wright. All of those women met as successful family life bloggers in the 2010s, and all three are divorced. Hatmaker was the last to get divorced, and she invited Kristen and Jamie onto her podcast to talk about the different trajectories they took that led them to divorce, which were far more complex than simply becoming a little bit famous. But for all three of them, it was an aggravating factor. For one of them, it was as simple as realizing that many people wanted to read their work and found them smart, which raised their self-esteem and made their marriage less sustainable. Something that has stuck with me is that Jamie and Kristen told Hatmaker that while she was still married, she was a “human spotlight, and clean up crew.” Whenever she was praised or asked about her newest book, she was always trying to redirect to shine a light on her husband. Hatmaker talked about how, looking back, she was always trying to shrink. Maybe if she became small enough, she could control his resentment. There was this underlying uneasiness about her being more of a main character, when that was a man’s role to occupy.

When women gain a spotlight, even if they do not directly discuss marriage and relationships as a part of their content, there is an unspoken expectation that their marriage isn’t shitty. Everyone is extremely interested in how their husband treats them, because women are still more heavily judged for being married to bad partners than men are for being the bad partners. Women with a platform know this and subconsciously end up running endless PR campaigns for their husbands. After the Lindy West debacle, I wrote a piece called, is having a husband embarrassing too? where I discussed Lindy doing the same thing, running PR for her, in my opinion, shitty husband. Because having a shitty husband is seen as a personal failing. I think the increased attention on a public figure’s marriage can both cause and reveal cracks, which in turn makes women work harder to put out a glaring message that everything is fine.

While I know this comes off as me thinking men are just intimidated by successful women, I think it’s actually deeper and more nuanced than that. My friend Cartoons Hate Her! wrote a great piece about high-earning and high-achieving men, which showed what we have seen in tons of survey data: men and women tend to pair off within their own income and education brackets. Tech CEOs don’t marry 19-year-old baristas, and attorneys are not typically looking to date women who have no interest in a career, even if that woman ends up sacrificing her career to care for her family. No, I think what’s going on here is that these people got married in the way people typically do, which in our society meant that the man was the presumed main character. Women’s role is to support his career, his dreams, and to remain in the background. They married someone in their education and income bracket, and then their wife unexpectedly became a main character. And no matter how hard she tries to placate, to share her spotlight, to let him indulge in the fruits of her success, it’s never enough.

Jaime Fish, who is one of my favorite TikTok follows, summed it up really well in this video:

Our culture teaches men to value competition and women to value collaboration. While both things have a place, in the context of marriage, there should be only collaboration. Sometimes you will be the partner in the spotlight; sometimes you will have the supporting role. Your partner’s success can just….benefit you. Your wife becoming more successful doesn’t make you a loser, and we would find it insane for a woman to suggest that her male partner’s success made her feel less than.

I am terribly sorry for Jen Hamilton and for her feeling so much pain. But I have never met a smart, kind, successful woman who has not become a much better version of herself once she has been freed from the person who made her shrink. Divorce is traumatic and transformative, and I am so excited to see who she will become in its wake.