The Vanderpump Rules Relationship Is a Special Kind of Hell 

This season of Vanderpump Rules is centered around a wedding between two people who clearly despise each other—not to be confused with season 3 of Pump Rules, which was centered around a wedding between a woman and a tree stump (who was recently served with divorce papers).

In their bizarre quest to marry each other, Katie Maloney, a petulant cotton mouth with a wholly undeserved god complex, is pitted against her fiancee Tom Schwartz, a passive-aggressive doormat who for some reason keeps getting modeling jobs. They sure do not make being in a relationship look fun! In this week’s episode, we discover that the theme of Katie’s wedding—and this is Katie’s wedding, am I right, ladies?—is “woodsy elegance,” which means, as far as I can tell, that it is a wedding (elegance) in the woods (woodsy).

The show goes to great pains to reinforce the well-established roles that Katie and Tom are playing here: Katie, more focused on her wedding than the relationship that will ostensibly survive it, has a “vision” and it involves spending (or “spending,” since obviously the show is footing at least some of this bill) irresponsibly and steamrolling her partner into agreeing with everything she says. Schwartz is a man with cold feet who is emasculated at every turn—forced to do a creepy underwear modeling job to pay for the wedding, for example, or told his “dick doesn’t work” during an argument. Many euphemistic references are made to Katie’s “dark side,” i.e. her alcoholic outbursts.

No one else in the cast appears capable of making a good case for the merits of heterosexual romance, including lovebirds Tom and Ariana, whose smug date I was unable to take seriously due to the deliberate white streaks in Tom’s weird black bob.