The Anthony Ramos/Jasmine Cephas Jones breakup solidifies a Wife Guy theory.

Anthony Ramos—fan-favorite, swoon-worthy star of critical hits like In the Heights and Hamilton—is in the hot seat. After TikTokkers shared clips of him allegedly at a strip club getting up close and personal with a woman other than his similarly beloved fiancée, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Ramos trended all over social media with a scarlet letter: Cheater. Heartbreaker. Asshole. Perhaps worst of all, he transformed into the worst kind of guy—the Fake Wife Guy.

The Wife Guy is nothing novel in the world of celebrity gossip and in the parasocial relationships born out of being Very Online. Ramos has long been a sterling example of the type: He and Cephas Jones met while working on Hamilton in 2015, got engaged in 2018, and have been cute and cuddly in public since day one. For someone thought to be so loving and lovable to then (supposedly) commit a cardinal sin—not just cheating on his fiancée but cheating on the (figurative) Wife to his Wife Guy—is a uniquely embarrassing, enraging offense to the fans that invest so much into famous relationships that aren’t theirs.

This sordid episode made us realize that, as much as the public seems to love Wife Guys, from Ramos to John Mulaney to Will Smith, we love to hate them just as much. What is the benefit to the moniker, if any? Or is it, perhaps, nothing more than a simple curse?

Recently, five of Slate’s biggest celebrity enthusiasts, gossip mill scrutinizers, and relationship theorists came together to discuss these and other probing questions.

Rebecca Onion: I’m pretty sure the Wife Guy couldn’t exist without social media. Wife Guy is a person who publicly celebrates both his wife, as a person, and his couplehood. Wife Guy makes his wife’s virtues a constant topic in public and posts schmoopy things about domestic life. Wife Guy is unable to say anything that sounds at all realistic about marriage and relationships! He is happier than could possibly ever be true. And that’s why a rupture is such a risk for him: When we see the cracks, we’re like, “I FREAKING KNEW IT!!!”

Rachelle Hampton: It’s impossible to talk about the Wife Guy without talking about Curvy Wife Guy, who defined the genre. Curvy Wife Guy went viral after an unnecessarily long Instagram post about how much he loves his wife despite the fact she’s not a size 2. The undertone of that post was that he was the bravest among men for daring to love this objectively hot woman, and while that mentality isn’t necessary for a Wife Guy (Anthony Ramos, importantly, doesn’t do this), I’d say that 9 out of 10 Wife Guys also, like Curvy, neg their wives while writing their schmoopy posts about domestic life.

Rebecca: Thank you, Rachelle. That is an excellent point. The recent Chris Pratt post about his wife Katherine Schwarzenegger—a post that got dinged (including in Slate) for some weird stuff about “healthy babies”—was a Wife Guy post that was sort of neg-y, in my eyes. The whole thing was a long cascade about how much he loved his wife because of all the things she does for him (while he does literally nothing), but the end result…