Culture

Let’s Unpack The Try Guys Cheating Scandal Everyone Is Talking About

You either die a wife guy, or live long enough to get divorced.

by Charles Rushforth  28 September 2022

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Popular YouTuber and notorious wife guy Ned Fulmer has been expelled from the comedy troupe Try Guys following an extramarital affair.

So rather than facing conversation around a much anticipated anti-corruption bill, or the wide ramifications of Optus’ recent data leak, Australians awoke on Wednesday to furious internet discourse surrounding the fall from grace of another American Wife Guy: The Try Guy.

But who or what is a Try Guy, and what do hordes of angry ex-Buzzfeed employees have to do with this?

Let us explain.

Death Of The Wife Guy

Ned Fulmer — one of the four founding members of Try Guys — started the popular Youtube channel while working as an employee at BuzzFeed. The channel was a vehicle for Fulmer and his fellow co-workers to experiment with bending social norms like wearing women’s underwear, in a wholesome manner akin to that of a six-year-old boy.

The experiment was a hit, resulting in Fulmer and co. leaving BuzzFeed to form their own company dedicated to Try Guys, known as ‘2nd Try LLC’. Since then, Fulmer has literally built a career on being the biggest, baddest wife guy in the jungle of monogamy — launching cooking books and video sketches all anchored in the loving bond between Fulmer and his wife, Ariel.

A wife guy, as defined by fellow Junkee writer Reena Gupta, is “a man who is married to a woman; is sexually attracted to that woman, and wishes to make this known to as many people as possible”.

However, every wife guy’s proud proclamation of everlasting loyalty casts a dark shadow — that despite being married, men still cheat on women like scorpions sting frogs.

So when Try Guys fans began to notice that Fulmer had been edited out of some of the promotional material for the YouTube series, people (rightly) suspected the worst.

A DIY ‘Try Guy’ Investigation Yields Results

While pulling at the threads of Fulmer’s seemingly intentional erasure from recent Try Guys episodes, fans stumbled on something more sinister.

Against all the odds, a random Redditor claimed to have evidence of Fulmer allegedly making out with a woman in a bar in New York. While the blurry video wasn’t much to go off, fans went to extreme lengths to confirm Fulmer as the individual in the video.

Making matters worse, fans theorised that the woman in the video was none other than Try Guys producer Alex Herring, who is currently engaged. After discovering that Herring’s fiancé had also removed all photos of her from his personal Instagram page, fans were convinced they had found their smoking gun.

This elaborate fan hunch was finally proven correct after Fulmer took to social media to confirm that he was stepping back from the show after having a “consensual relationship” with a co-worker.

You Either Die A Wife Guy, Or Live Long Enough To Get Divorced

An unexpected consequence of Fulmer’s dirty laundry being being publicly aired, has been the hive of excitement from ex-BuzzFeed employees circa 2014-2018, with many taking to social media to share their takes on the drama.

Despite many Australians before this week not knowing what a Try Guy is, perhaps there’s a lesson to be learnt after all from this. Firstly, don’t make your whole personality a wife guy unless… nope, just don’t brand yourself as a wife guy, probably. This was never not a weird thing to do.