"I want to make one thing clear: Marriages don’t end because of one single event. Marriages end slowly, often over the course of many small events, until finally, one single moment reveals that there’s no marriage left at all, like the street lights suddenly turning on after a long, slow summer sunset.
My marriage didn’t end because of TikTok, but I often think about how TikTok drove the final nail into the coffin of my union with Ben, who was unable to separate the pseudo-medical jargon of Gen Z short-form content makers from reality. When I think about the way my marriage ended, I think about a lot of moments: the time I caught him cheating and allowed him to gaslight me into believing I had imagined it; the time he told me, “You’re my wife, so if I say we’re moving, we are moving” like I was his property to drag around as he pleased; or the time I caught him recording me with our Furbo pet cam during my therapy sessions; but I think it was TikTok that finally made me realize there was nothing left. There had been nothing left for a while, but the street lights had finally come on when my then-husband began taking Adderall, an amphetamine, because TikTok made him believe he needed it.
From echo chamber to prescription
I had not even heard of TikTok until we were well into the initial pandemic lockdown of 2020 when Ben was scrolling it for what felt like hours at a time. I, an avid Instagrammer, was entirely uninterested in another app to keep up with and even less interested in participating in the prerequisite steps (hair, makeup, wardrobe) to creating my own short-form video content, so I rarely even opened it. Ben, however, was hooked. He never made one single video, but he watched them like it was his ticket back to reality, all while bringing him further and further from it.
Like the app itself, Ben’s For You Page started out pretty innocently: funny trending sounds, impressive transitions, funny voice-overs, and greenscreen effects, but what makes TikTok so brilliant is its ability to recognize the kind of content you interact with and feed you more of it, until you’re surrounded by a universe of accounts that create an echo chamber of viewpoints that reflect and reinforce your own. For Ben, this echo chamber came to say one thing: You have ADHD, and you need to be medicated.
“With each new video that graced his screen, the list of his symptoms got longer and longer.”
I don’t remember the first time he expressed to me that he believed he had ADHD, but I recall it coming up in conversation many times before he finally made an appointment with a psychiatrist in late 2021. Ben, who had worked from home exclusively since the start of the pandemic, complained of difficulty focusing on his job tasks, inability to stay organized, forgetfulness around what he stood up to do, and impulsivity when it came to online shopping. “Those all sound like normal things for someone in their 30s to experience,” I told him, “especially when they work from home all day.” I told him that I didn’t think he needed medication, but rather to build a community outside of our small apartment. I recommended that he, a runner, make some friends by joining a running club or taking up a new hobby, but he insisted that he didn’t want to do any of those things.
Day after day, he’d send me multiple TikToks explaining how his symptoms were clear signs of ADHD. He would lament over how his elementary school tried to tell his mother that he had ADD as a child, but she wouldn’t let him be medicated because she didn’t believe them. With each new video that graced his screen, the list of his symptoms got longer and longer. All of a sudden, one of his symptoms was a social-anxiety-related inability to make phone calls, which, as he was a former phone salesman, was not something I had ever seen him suffer from before.
One night, after many, many psychiatrist appointments (which I now believe were with multiple different doctors until he found one willing to treat him), Ben came home with news. “The doctor is going to call and talk to you,” he told me. “He wants to ask you a few questions before he prescribes me any medication.” I was shocked. The doctor wanted to talk to me? What do I know?
Within just a few minutes, the doctor called Ben’s phone and, as soon as I said hello, asked me to go someplace private. I stepped outside and walked down the block.
“Ma’am, do you believe your husband has ADHD?”
I didn’t hesitate. “No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because the things he complains about are things we all experience from time to time, and the more he watches these TikToks, the more of these symptoms he displays. It feels psychosomatic. He’s never been like this before now.”
The doctor paused. “OK, thank you very much.”
And just like that, the conversation ended. Part of me felt guilty for not being a more supportive wife to my struggling husband, but in my heart of hearts, I truly did not believe that he had ADHD. I went back inside, and we didn’t speak about it for the rest of the evening.
The next day, Ben was prescribed Adderall.
It didn’t take long for the fights to get worse.
Realizing I no longer loved my husband
“I wouldn’t care if you fucked someone else,” he told me one afternoon, out of thin air. “I would truly not feel anything.”
The smallest things would send him into fits of rage. He became irritable and malicious. He experienced drastic mood swings and lashed out at strangers. His heart rate spiked so easily that he could no longer run. All he could do was sit at home, watching TikToks. After all of that, he wound up right back where he started.
“I wouldn’t care if you fucked someone else… I would truly not feel anything.”
During this time, I was diving deeper into my career and becoming more and more successful. I found myself in my work but felt lost in my own home. I started adding fake meetings to my calendar to spend more time away because I knew I’d come home to Ben, likely still in his pajamas, unshowered and often without having brushed his teeth, on the couch, phone in hand. It became increasingly difficult to respect him, and I started to feel resentful of the way he could sit at home watching TikToks while I went to my client-facing job each and every day. I became bitter about coming home to someone who was no longer a partner to me but a person I didn’t recognize whose anger and spite had risen to levels I had never experienced before. Before long, I was completely withdrawn from the relationship. There was no more denying what I wanted.
“If you love him, you have to help him through this,” my mother told me after I finally explained to her what had been happening. “But what if I don’t love him?” I asked. She paused. “Then you’ve got to get out of there.”
Why I still refuse to use TikTok
Marriages don’t end because of one single event. Marriages end slowly, often over the course of many small events, until finally, one single moment reveals that there’s no marriage left at all, like the street lights suddenly turning on after a long, slow summer sunset. When I think about the realization that my marriage was over, I think about a lot of moments: finally admitting to myself that I was in love with someone else; the first time I said the word “divorce” out loud; the nights I pretended to have late work meetings so I could spend time with friends to avoid going home; but I think it was the understanding that I didn’t even recognize the person sitting beside me anymore. He was gone, and someone else had replaced him.
When I told him I wanted a divorce, he was angry at how calm I was. “I’ve had a long time to mourn this,” I said.
“Marriages end slowly, often over the course of many small events, until finally, one single moment reveals that there’s no marriage left at all.”
Looking back, the process of separating feels like it was just a small blip in time, but in reality, it was months of screaming, fighting, and crying. It was sleeping next to one another without ever speaking, making “yours” and “mine” piles of the things we had gathered together over the years, and not asking one another where we were going or who we’d be with. We’d try to politely watch TV together or split the cost of Uber Eats if we were both hungry. We blocked one another on all forms of social media but still politely shared a “how was your day?” Some days, he was kind to me, others, he tried to make my life a living hell with blackmail and threats. He moved out after two months of living separately together, and the day he left was the first time I felt like I could breathe since I told him it was over.
To this day, the only form of social media I use is Instagram. I know that the Reels I’m watching are the same as I’d see if I were on TikTok, but abstaining from the app feels like a form of protest. You cannot get me again. I’m free.
My marriage didn’t end because of TikTok, but TikTok did take someone from me.
Names have been changed to protect identities.