Ultimatum Queer Love: Understanding Queer DV
FYI this piece contains spoilers for season two of the Ultimatum: Queer Love
If you, like me, are a queer person with even a passing interest in reality television then it’s likely you’ve watched some if not all of Netflix’s Ultimatum Queer Love. On Wednesday June 7th Netflix dropped the last 2 episodes of the season which included the finale and reunion episodes. The premise of the Ultimatum is that people bring their long-term partners onto the show and give them an Ultimatum, namely get engaged or break-up. Season one, like most reality shows, followed straight couples and season two, “Queer Love” highlighted sapphic centered queer folks.
What’s become clear to me is that for many queer people Ultimatum Queer Love is like a Rorschach test of the community and relationship dynamics that are most activating to each of us. Where I kept telling my friends, “like objectively Aussie’s avoidant attachment style and horrible communication is the worst, right??,” other friends were most appalled by Vanessa’s cringy and dismissive behavior or Yoly’s taking off her engagement ring before meeting up with Xander. We each see what makes sense to us in our own worlds.
Mildred and Tiff.
From the very first episode we see the high intensity, high conflict dynamic that is the relationship between Mildred and Tiff. Before diving in any deeper I want to say that these are real people who were in a real relationship. A portion of that relationship was put into the reality television machine, edited and spit back to us on Netflix. I do not know Mildred or Tiff and I have no special information about them as people or their relationship.
I’m interested in what unfolded between Mildred and Tiff on the reunion episode and even more so I’m interested in how people are making meaning of what they saw. Throughout the season we see Mildred and Tiff in near constant conflict; we learn that they have broken up literally hundreds of times in the course of a 2 year relationship and we see glimpses of what I suspect are much deeper and more intense arguments between them.
In the second to last episode we see Tiff propose to Mildred and they leave the show a seemingly happily engaged couple. In the reunion episode we come to learn that that is not the case. As the reunion starts we see all of the Ultimatum participants in chairs with Ultimatum givers on one side of the stage and the Ultimatum receivers on the other. When the host turns to Tiff and Mildred we learn that they are no longer together. What starts as an explanation of what happened after the finale was shot very quickly devolves into open conflict.
A lot was said during this argument on stage. We learn that they moved in together after the show stopped filming, that Tiff struggled to bond with Mildred’s teenage son, we learn that Tiff’s beloved dog was sick and had to have surgery close to Christmas. And we learn directly from Mildred that during a fight she broke a picture frame, threw something heavy at Tiff and was ultimately arrested.
It is painful to watch people treat each other horribly. It’s even more painful when the people who are acting bad are familiar to you. I’m a big fan of reality television. I’ve been deep into “Bachelor Nation” for over a decade, watched every season of Love is Blind and am slowly being sucked into Perfect Match. For decades I’ve watched straight people on reality dating shows. As a queer person I’ve felt relatively detached from the “reality” portrayed on these shows. Is that what straight people do? IDK. In Ultimatum Queer Love the people portrayed on the show were familiar to me. While I don’t know any of the people myself, queer communities are small and interconnected. LGBTQ people have our own culture and norms inside of our communities. We have literally built our own ways of being in relationship with each other. As a queer person I don’t think I’m alone in the feeling that watching queer people in the reality television machine just felt more…real to me. And so did the pain.
I watched the reunion episode the day the final episodes dropped. That night I was in bed scrolling Tik Tok, taking in reactions to the relationship between Mildred and Tiff. Overwhelmingly those first night reactions were outrage that Netflix wasn’t taking domestic violence more seriously and there were many people calling Mildred an abuser.
I have spent my entire adult life working to support LGBTQ survivors of domestic violence. I have spent the last 20 years inside my own queer communities addressing the harm we do to each other. What I saw in these reactions to the exchange between Mildred and Tiff hit me hard. It hit me hard because I am a queer survivor of domestic violence. It hit me hard because how I saw other LGBTQ people making sense of what was portrayed told me we all seem to understand domestic violence very differently from each other.
Domestic violence is one of those words that is used over and over again but rarely has a shared definition. Many people who have worked to support survivors of domestic violence can tell you that “domestic violence is a pattern of power and control,” but outside the domestic violence movement few people have internalized exactly what that means.
The core harm of domestic violence is objectification. It’s taking a person who has agency over their life and limiting that person's choices, making their world smaller and creating the conditions where a person is less in charge of what happens in their own life. Violence is a tool of objectification. Physical violence can be a tool in controlling someone but physical violence doesn’t have to be present for a relationship to be abusive.
What I learned in decades of working with LGBTQ people to assess patterns of power and control in their relationships is that people who are setting up a pattern of power and control (people who are abusive) are allergic to accountability. What I’ve seen is that people who are surviving a pattern of power and control (survivors) are often very willing to take responsibility for dynamics in the relationship. It’s not uncommon for survivors to be over-accountable in an abusive relationship, taking responsibility for things that are not in their control. People who are abusive are often telling survivors that everything is their fault. Survivors internalize these messages. When I was regularly answering calls at the LGBTQ domestic violence organization it was not uncommon for people to call up and say, “I think I’m being abusive,” only for us to do an assessment and discover that in fact that person is not being abusive but surviving a pattern of power and control.
There are no simple answers here. There is not an equation that will simply allow us to understand the complexity of patterns of abusive behavior. Domestic violence is a pattern of power and control. By definition a pattern is more than one thing. There is no one behavior or moment that can tell us who is surviving a pattern of power and control and who is establishing the pattern of abuse.
In an LGBTQ context we can’t use gender to determine who is surviving and who is being abusive. In response, the LGBTQ domestic violence movement has developed a practice of assessing the dynamics in our relationships to help us understand who is setting up the pattern of abusive behavior and who is surviving it. At its core this assessment is taking the time to understand the dynamics in a relationship, whose world is getting smaller, whose self-determination matters and whose is disregarded. The goal of this assessment is to make sure that everyone gets the support that is right for them.
We don’t throw away people who are abusive. Everyone needs support. For people who are surviving a pattern of power and control they need support in self-determination and safety, for people who are maintaining the pattern of power and control they need support in stopping their abusive behavior and being accountable for the harm they’ve caused.
As with many things developed by and for queer and trans communities, the things we build for our own survival are helpful to the mainstream as well. It’s helpful to zoom out and understand the context in which violence happens. It’s helpful to understand not only what happened in a moment of violence but what led up to that violence and what happened afterwards.
Was it very bad between Mildred and Tiff? Absolutely. Where unhealthy and toxic behaviors shown from both of them? 100% Was there a pattern of abusive behavior where Mildred gained control and limited Tiff’s choices over time? We just don’t have enough information to know.
“But Mildred was arrested after breaking a picture frame and throwing something at Tiff, how could she not be the abuser?”
We cannot use the criminal legal system to tell us who is and is not abusive. Survivors are arrested for domestic violence way more than you’d think. Domestic violence is a pattern of power and control. The criminal legal system doesn’t deal with patterns of violence, it deals with moments in time. When the police show up to a domestic violence call they aren’t looking at a pattern of behavior over time, they are looking at the situation and determining if a crime occurred.
Mildred was the one who brought up that she broke a picture frame and threw something at Tiff. Mildred was the one who told us she was arrested. From what they shared on the reunion episode it sounds like Tiff continued to live in the house that they rented together after they broke-up while Mildred was still paying the rent. What I know is that I saw Tiff flooded and overwhelmed at the reunion show. I heard Mildred interrupt Tiff. I heard Tiff say that they struggled to have a relationship with Mildred’s son. What I saw over the course of the show were plenty of instances where both blew up and escalated quickly. We see Tiff escalating quickly while fighting with Sam (their “trial wife”) about their dog. All of that is information. None of it tells me if it’s domestic violence and if so who is surviving and who is being abusive.
For people who watched the reunion and felt activated by what they saw, I want to say that your pain is valid. Netflix should not have put TIff and Mildred on stage together. Your outrage, that real harm that’s happening between two people is treated so lightly by Netflix, is important. We should deeply care when people harm each other. It hurts. I am so sorry that we are all holding so much pain with so little support.
My deepest wish for this moment of reality TV is not that we collectively decide what is the truth for two people whose relationship we only saw a small portion of but rather that we use our reactions to this situations as a catalyst to better understand how domestic violence shows up in our lives and communities and get curious what role we each have in creating the conditions where loving equitable relationships are possible, likely and expected.
