A Lesson in Oversharing from the Real Housewives of Orange County
LatestThe drama-packed trailer for the tenth season of the Real Housewives of Orange County has lived up to much of the side-eye inducting antics it promised. Near the eye of that storm of crazy is a chronicle of the marriage troubles between Shannon Beador and her husband David.
In the first episode of the season, Shannon revealed that David had an affair for close to a year. Watching them on the previous season, the two quite clearly had other issues, which one can only imagine were compounded by David’s infidelity.
The Beadors have gone on to bring up David’s affair and their struggle to stay married and remotely happy on what seems like every episode of the season. This is the storyline Shannon has chosen for herself and dammit if she’s not sticking to it.
We’ve seen them in couples therapy, we see them bicker over David’s drinking and carelessness and Shannon’s tendency to anger quickly. Perhaps most depressingly, we see Shannon and David talk openly about the affair with their three tween daughters during a scene where David apologizes to the entire family.
Shannon has said that they decided to share their extremely personal issues on national television because it was an opportunity to show other couples that an affair doesn’t have to mean divorce. David added, “If we can help just one couple, than it was worth letting it out there because it certainly wasn’t an easy thing to do for Shannon or for myself. If we can help one couple, or one family, it is all worth it.”
On Monday night’s episode, Shannon, David and their three daughters glumly celebrate Shannon’s 51st birthday at what looks like an upscale tavern. Shannon looks teary-eyed and seems to complain almost the entire time. You can sort of see where she was coming from—it wasn’t the most elegant of affairs—but dear god, woman.
She explains that she had particularly high expectations for this year’s celebration because her 50th birthday was a disaster. She then tells an audience of over a million people one of the darkest stories I’ve ever heard on reality television. Apparently David and Shannon had sex on her birthday and David later told her that afterwards, he left and had sex with his mistress that very same night.