The women finally get honest about what is going on in their lives, and nothing is as refreshing as Kyle finally admitting what’s happening in her love life.
Photo: Bravo
On this episode of our favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things! They compared their identical Birkins, each with a price tag, and we all wondered what exactly made one worth $32,000, one worth $30,000, and one worth $14,000, and why all of them were unclasped and hanging open like chastity belts on a wedding day. They went to a fancy china store with their fancy daughters to register for fancy gifts for their fancy wedding, which isn’t even fancy-planned yet because the most fancy thing of all is being so fancy that you don’t have to fancy-plan. They gathered at a friend’s house for cocktails and cock tales, when they drew a bunch of nude male models. Not one of them did a good job, but that one model (who was definitely a bottom) had his ass in the air the whole time and then was showering his dick with the moonlight naked in the pool until some poor party planner told him it was time to leave.
But mostly what the rich women did was finally be honest. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you! That is all we ever wanted. Just what you gave us at the very end of the episode — the acknowledgement that what we saw was real, the nod that there is some truth behind the gossip, just a hint of why she couldn’t talk about it. We can fill in the blanks, but we needed the outline rather than just stonewalling us like we were the crazy ones for asking a reality star about her life. That’s what Boz and Rachel were reacting to in their first scene together, where Boz goes to check out Rachel’s (gasp!) rental. Rachel immediately picks up that Kyle doesn’t want to talk about her dating life, and Boz says they can’t even speculate about it or bring it up. Later in the episode, Boz says they can never get to the heart of the matter: Kyle either needs to “kill it completely” or acknowledge it.
That’s finally what happens when Kyle calls Erika over to sit on her back porch in rocking chairs like they were in an old Bartles and Jaymes commercial that came out the year new girl Amanda was born. Kyle wants to lay it to rest once and for all and starts by asking Erika if she were dating someone and very much in love, but that person didn’t want to be a part of her public life: “Would you betray this person just because people are curious?” Erika says she would protect that person. I fully understand that impulse, but again, we never wanted the sordid details; we just wanted some acknowledgement of what we were already seeing and that we weren’t crazy for asking.
Kyle says that she’s always been honest — which is true of her time on the show in general, even if she has not always been especially forthcoming — and that she’s honest when she says “I’m single now.” She then lays it all out in the world’s dumbest blind item, telling us she fell very hard for “this person” and was deeply in love during a vulnerable time in her life. She acknowledges that they were dating, that it was a relationship, and that there were intense feelings. She wanted to talk about it and be very public, but “this person,” whose name rhymes with Schmorgan Spade, didn’t want “the scrutiny and the gossip.” Kyle then says that the public aspect of her life is what ended it. Kyle is telling all of this in her new confessional look featuring a menswear blazer, a feminine version of a men’s tie, and a light wave in her hair. It is the most lesbionic look I have ever seen outside of Kristen Stewart’s Instagram stories. Is this RHOBH or The L Word? I also love that Kyle is such a lesbian now that even when she draws a naked man, it ends up looking like a woman, like one of Leo’s French girls from Titanic after she just got a manicure.
I’m sorry, but I really felt for Kyle in this moment on the porch. Sure, we’re only getting her side of the story, and she can be relaying any sort of scenario, and we have to believe it, but it sounds like Kyle was in love, she wanted to tell the world, and Schmorgan wouldn’t let her. What we saw in the past couple of seasons was Kyle trying to have it all, both her relationship and the public life that she can’t seem to live without, but those two things were incompatible. She never chose being on a reality show over her girlfriend, but it seems like her girlfriend made that decision for her and, well, I feel a little bad for her because it seems like Kyle wanted it to go on and that she might still be very much in love with “this person.”
What’s odd is that she seems very much in love with both of her exes. I like seeing Kyle and Mauricio together, but when she goes over to his house to bring him towels and tell him to stop getting his picture taken with skanks on the sidewalk (spoiler alert: it’s still happening), there’s a very strange vibe. She says that Mo moved into his rental and they were supposed to talk about the next step, but then he moved into this Hollywood home without telling her, and she feels like she was owed a discussion about whether or not they’re getting back together. Um, sorry, Kyle, but it’s over. He’s gone. You’re separated. You were entirely in love and in a relationship with another person. That seems pretty final to me, a lot more final than Mo and this middle-aged rumspringa he’s been splashing on Page Six for two years.
Kyle tells Mo that she’s “single” and he must know that means she and Morgan are dunzo. She also makes a strange face when he asks her if she’s dating anyone, as if it’s wild that her husband would ask. I’m all for a modern arrangement, but I don’t know what these two are holding on to. Someone needs to make a decision. Either they’re back together and this was all just a 24-month hall pass, or they’re apart and staying apart. I mean, there is a middle ground where they’re together, living in some open or open-ish relationship, but I can’t see Kyle going for that. But I feel like it’s not healthy to be in this middle-ground, this nowheresville where everyone is unhappy and just treading water, even if treading that water is smooching every 33-year-old Bachelor contestant who wants more followers or getting, ahem, reeeeeallllllyyyyy into country music.
We get a lot of honesty in this episode. We meet Amanda, the new girl, and she’s honest about how much younger she is than everyone else. Boz and her daughter Leal were honest about how Leal sees her mother’s relationship with Kealy. Dorit was honest about liking a Labubu bracelet that everyone else hated. I was fascinated by Erika’s honesty to Sutton about her relationship with Tom, fascinated party that she was being so open with Sutton when the two usually have nothing but ice-cold animosity for each other. “I have thought about visitng Tom,” Erika says. “Would he even see me? Would he know who I am? Will there be some magical answer to all the questions I have? No. I have realized through a lot of therapy that sometimes you’re not getting closure, you have to close it yourself.” She seems, I don’t know, resigned but also exhausted, like it’s still not over and probably never will be.
Dorit is also being very honest about PK, a dirty locker room floor that wants to give you a full body hug. She said that her kids are struggling with the divorce. Well, not the divorce. They don’t know about that yet. They’re struggling with the rancid vibe emanating from their parents’ absolute loathing for each other, which they won’t address. Dorit is trying to solve it by sending her kids to visit her parents in Florida for a few weeks, but PK, an ill-fitting thong made out of an alligator’s taint skin, has blocked it just to torture her.
Everyone goes around the room and talks about how awful he is, how he’s a terrible father, how he’s giving Dorit nothing, but not Kyle! She suggests a compromise with PK, a dead jellyfish that still finds a way to sting your clit, and Dorit shoos it away, saying that he’s only trying to find a way to hurt her. Kyle says, “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.” Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Kyle. That is not it. That is not the way. She needs to choose which side of this divorce she is on or else we’re going to have a repeat of last season. Kyle says it’s hard for her because she knows him and can’t trash-talk him like the rest of the women. Well, even if she can’t, she can surely keep her mouth shut. If she is on Dorit’s side, then she is on Dorit’s side. That means he is always wrong, she is always right, and everything about him is terrible. Just ask Erika, who also knows him from a little something called #Pantygate. She’s towing the company line.
Kyle was right, trying to offer some compromise between the two. Being a good friend is not just agreeing with your friends’ skewed assumptions about their partner or soon-to-be-ex partner. You can make suggestions, you can nudge them into the way of the angels. But once that decision is made, you have your friend’s back, and that is something Kyle can’t manage to do with Dorit, especially when it comes to choosing her over PK, a wad of cat hair-flavored chewing gum stuck on the bottom of your shoe. It seems like her devotion to him is a bit like her devotion to Mo, something that she can’t let go of, like some kind of vestige of her old life. Kyle is finally telling us the truth: her relationship happened and ended. She’s rueful about her divorce and might want to turn it around, but sticking up for Dorit’s horrible ex isn’t a way back into that life. Instead Kyle is still outside on her back porch, still wondering where it all went wrong, still wondering how she can have it all when she is the one who fucked it all up. There are no solutions, no easy answers, no flower crowns that bring enlightenment, no sunrises that rejuvenate the soul. There is only Kyle and her porch and her chair and the rocking, the rocking, the rocking, the rocking.
