“Who TF Did I Marry?!?,” the TikTok user Reesa Teesa’s account of her relationship with her ex-husband, is a story for grown-ups. Over the course of 50 videos, in a monologue topping six hours, Reesa methodically unspools her ex’s web of purported lies. She gives him the code-name “Legion.”
Legion, she says, claimed to have a managerial job at a condiment company, well-stocked savings accounts and approval to buy a company car. He promised her a new house, fresh appliances, a trip abroad. In the end, she says, none of these suburban comforts materialized.
The details of Reesa’s marriage are bizarre and outrageous, but its consumer landscape is familiar. It is an account of midlife — its markers of success and the disillusionment that sets in when they fail to arrive. It is perhaps the first blockbuster of TikTok’s middle-aged era. The opening installment alone, posted on Valentine’s Day, has been viewed more than 37 million times.
Ryan Broderick, in his internet-focused newsletter Garbage Day, analyzed recent data on TikTok users and found that, despite the app’s reputation as a platform for dancing minors, it is increasingly a den of millennials, a cohort born between 1981 and 1996. I am one of them, and we are getting old. Nearly 40 percent of TikTok’s audience is now made up of 30- and 40-somethings, and its content is maturing to suit our obsessions, too.
The story begins in March of 2020, when Reesa, a woman in her 30s living in the Atlanta area, matches with Legion on Facebook Dating and Hinge. He quickly moves in with her (a timeline advanced by Covid’s spread) and they spend much of their early relationship test-driving cars that they will never own and touring open houses they will never occupy.
Legion’s purported lies concern the bureaucratic management of a suburban lifestyle: He shows her screenshots of savings accounts, a copy of a mortgage preapproval, memos from human resources. His lies have paperwork; someone is always printing something out. Just as Reesa starts to suspect that Legion is deceiving her (and this is where the story really embraces its aging demographic), he is unexpectedly bedridden, sidelined by an old knee injury.
Like many other viewers who popped off in the comments sections, I saw the series as an escape from my own domestic life, listening through headphones as I folded laundry and cleaned up after my children. Many videos deep, it started to feel as if I was watching an excruciatingly honest version of a real-estate reality show, one in which the prospective buyer is led through the paces of home acquisition only to discover that the deal is just beyond her grasp. Reesa says that Legion would narrate every part of the house hunt to her — he spoke of an all-cash offer, a home inspection, a scheduled close — before it inevitably fell apart at the last moment. These reality shows represent unreal fantasies, too; Reesa’s story just makes that explicit.
As Reesa drifts along with Legion’s unreliable narration of their shared life, she drills into the specifics of his domestic mirage. Reesa records many of her expansive monologues while driving in her car, but she has a terrific recall for facts, and her installments are lush with details.
One of the charms of her story is its density of brand names. Reesa does not tell us that she and Legion picked out furniture for their nonexistent house; she tells us that they picked out furniture at Rooms To Go, Ashley Furniture and American Signature for their nonexistent house. They put holds on appliances at Home Depot and Lowe’s. They ate at Red Lobster and the Cheesecake Factory. They test drove BMWs, Audis, Jaguars and Land Rovers.
Even as Reesa begins to doubt Legion’s largess, she is temporarily buoyed by these close encounters with consumer purchases. She tells us about paging through images of homes on Realtor.com and Zillow.com. (“I could see myself living there,” she says of one place. “I could see myself cooking there.”) She hunts online for a BMW with exact specifications: a dark blue X5 with a cognac interior. One afternoon, Legion tells her that a new Audi will be delivered to her home between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., but the car does not show. She is always living in this window, waiting for her promised lifestyle to finally appear.
Eventually, Reesa’s story veers toward an uneasy conclusion. When she finally confronts Legion and kicks him out of her home, she says, he moves into his car. And when he returns to the house to claim some of his things, he is arrested over an outstanding warrant, and his car is repossessed. The man who promised her the world is left with nothing, and soon, he is exposed everywhere: As the series unfolded, internet sleuths raced to uncover Legion’s true identity. A few days ago, Reesa posted an update to issue some clarifications that Legion’s brother requested that she relay to her now large audience. Legion was diagnosed in childhood, the brother told her, with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Compressed into its bare plot points, Reesa’s story is a depressing anecdote about mental illness, homelessness, incarceration and American capitalism. But stretched into 50 parts, it is easy to be seduced by its front-loaded fantasy details, its accounts of S.U.V. models and kitchen islands, which knit together into an epic consumer fairy tale. In the end, social media managers for a succession of brands — Hilton, Delta, BMW — arrived in Reesa’s comments section, creating buzz for their companies by hinting that they might deliver her a prize. On Thursday, Reesa posted another video extending her saga: She’s still waiting on that BMW.
