Rachel Hollis, Mommy Blogger and Relationship Coach Is Getting A Divorce
Girl, you’ve been made.
In case you missed it, women are shook because mommy blogger (turned lifestyle guru and relationship coach) Rachel Hollis just announced that she and her husband of nearly 20 years are getting a divorce.
“Guys, I have some hard news to share and the honest truth is, I have no idea how someone announces something like this, so I’m just going to say it. Dave and I have made the incredibly difficult decision to end our marriage.
We started out as best friends 18 years ago and the truth is, that core friendship and the parts of us that work so well, have become a band-aid for the parts of us that don’t. We have worked endlessly over the last three years to make this work and have come to the conclusion that it is healthier and more respectful for us to choose this as the end of our journey as a married couple. We remain dear friends as we raise our family as co-parents and run our company as partners. We are choosing joy—even though, I’ll be honest, the last month has been one of the most awful of our lives. I want to be strong and bold and optimistic for you now, but every ounce of my energy is reserved in being those things for my children.
That said, having been such an open book to this beloved community, we hope that you can allow us a human moment. We hope you can understand our need to process these changes away from social media. We graciously ask that you respect our privacy so we can focus on what matters most, our four kids and the next chapter of what our family looks like now.”
Her devoted fans are so surprised that I spent the better part of my Monday night reading one new comment after the next from some poor soul describing their shock and dismay. Meanwhile, I’m trying to wrap my mind around the idea that anyone who’s actually read Girl, Wash Your Face is surprised.
Rachel’s Facebook post about the divorce went live last night and within just two hours it generated 6.5K comments. Love her or hate her, Rachel’s fans are serious about her empire. You know, the one she runs with that soon-to-be ex-husband, Dave.
For a woman who’s based her entire brand on telling it like it is, it looks like Rachel’s only been telling you what she thinks you need to hear. But this recent revelation suggests that the slightly sloppy yet miraculously put together Hollis hasn’t been as honest or vulnerable as she’s claimed.
After all, wouldn’t her fans have had some sort of inkling that the power couple was deeply struggling?
This whole story reeks of curated authenticity and it’s reminiscent of that other mommy blogger, Myka Stauffer, who recently gave away her adopted son. Granted, husbands are much easier (and far less controversial) to leave than a child. But much like Hollis, Myka has made a name for herself for supposedly being vulnerable and authentic.
So, when they reveal something so significant in their lives that shocks virtually their entire fan base, something about that tastes pretty damn fishy. Like the discovery that maybe these women aren’t so real after all.
In the case of Rachel and Dave Hollis, they’ve continued to dole out relationship advice as if they are these honest experts who can help you get your own romantic relationships back on track... despite trouble of their own. They don’t just talk about their marriage and offer passive advice here and there. They do a podcast together and set themselves up as a couple that’s made it. They even host couples’ seminars that cost thousands of dollars to attend.
If you do a simple Google search, you’ll come up with a litany of stories about Rachel and Dave Hollis, along with their “amazing marriage” all in an effort to promote their books (he’s got one now too) and those RISE women’s weekends, yet still no honest account of their struggles.
Not really.
Instead, we get recent headlines like:
The path to enlightenment — and a happy marriage — the Hollis way
Let’s face it — they only just announced their divorce. After four children and 16 years of marriage, it’s not as if they made this decision overnight. They clearly had to know it was coming for a while. They also had to talk about how they would break the news online. How they might… spin it.
This was a great opportunity to actually come clean. You know, to give themselves some of that tough love she’s so damn famous for. But no. In her statement last night, Rachel told her fans that she and Dave need a “human moment.”
Except she’s not washing her face for this one. She’s hiding from reality. Rachel Hollis seems to think she’s done so much for her fans that they owe her more privacy. We’re talking about a woman who claims vulnerability at every turn and profits off of the honesty she doesn’t actually give.
Here’s what makes that so shitty.
Rachel Hollis has made a living by telling other women that they’re not trying hard enough.
If you’ve read her books, you know that Rachel is big on personal responsibility. For other people, anyway.
Rachel routinely talks about other women not living up to their potential. She wants everyone to know that if they’re not happy, it’s on them to fix it.
While I am all for taking personal responsibility and cultivating an internal locus of control, I see Rachel’s reasoning as something more extreme and a lot more dangerous. A lot of her advice reads like that out-of-touch “friend” who’s never seen a day of real adversity herself. By utilizing marketable proverbs at every turn, she encourages women to “just be happy” without actually acknowledging or working through their issues.
One of the worst things about Rachel Hollis is the way she confuses platitudes with actually doing the work.
Much of her advice is inappropriate for a woman suffering from depression, or other mental health issues, for example. And some of her “wisdom” is just plain gross, like when she encourages women to get rid of their fat friends, including those who have lost and regained weight:
“Y’all, would you respect her? Would you count on Pam or the friend who keeps blowing you off for stupid reasons? Would you trust them when they committed to something? Would You believe them then when they committed to you? No.”
Rachel Hollis is so far above the rest of us that she gets away with shaming anyone who “fails” at anything, including mental health and weight loss. If they don’t reach their goal, they didn’t try hard enough. They didn’t want it bad enough. Well, what about this divorce? How can she tell the world that she’s “worked endlessly” on her marriage when she’s already said repeatedly that if you really want something, you’ll make it work?
For someone who loves to dole out advice about how to be successful, she sure has a problem with accepting failure. Especially her own.
She’s also refused to show us any of her failures — without giving them a quick makeover first.
Toward the end of 2018, Buzzfeed published a very eye-opening story about Rachel Hollis and her “dark message.” In it, Laura Turner writes that Rachel has a habit of writing as if any adversity or failure in her life is a thing of the past.
She speaks of her past struggles, whether it’s emotional eating, or a toxic relationship as if they’ve already been resolved. But then we discover how much moral superiority she imbues into dieting and weight loss, or we discover that the toxic relationship she been describing from years ago is actually with her husband.
The absence of even a shred of self-awareness is something I find shocking. How certain passages of her book ever made it past an editor is beyond me. All I can really think is that we still let pretty, slim, and wealthy white women get away with being utterly vacuous. And that’s a damn shame.
By now, some folks think I’m being way too hard on Rachel, especially since I make a living by openly discussing my own life. My hope, however, is that people understand the difference between writing with vulnerability and setting yourself up as an actual life coach.
Anytime I write about making progress in my life, I have to follow it up with the three steps (at least) that I’ve also taken back. Because that’s what success actually looks like. It’s messy and tinged with various failures along the way. We want success to be some beautiful end game but it’s really just one complex piece of the journey.
When Rachel leaves her failures out or tries to dress them up as if they’re in the past, she does no one any favors — the least of all herself.
And that, of course, shows in her issues with plagiarism. How can we take her calls for personal responsibility seriously when a trail of plagiarized remarks follows her everywhere she goes? Here’s a story from early 2019. And here’s one of her non-apologies from about a month ago.
Both Dave and Rachel Hollis have taught us Toxic Relationships 101 and insisted that’s real love.
When I say that Rachel lacks self-awareness in her writing, that’s never more apparent than when she tells us about her relationship experience.
Her own words are jarring, and not in a good way.
“Because here’s the ugly truth: I was a booty call. The preacher’s daughter, the one who hadn’t ever been on a date, the conservative good girl... I drove to this man’s house every single night he asked me to and pretended that it didn’t gut me when he wouldn’t acknowledge me during the day.”
Folks, this kind of problem in a dating relationship is a classic red flag. She was inexperienced and apparently, addicted to a man who didn’t respect her.
“Toward the end of that year, when his company moved him to another state and our already tenuous relationship was threatened, my virginity went from technical to nonexistent. It was the last, best way I could think of to hold on to him.”
Spiritual sex-shaming aside, we all know that sex (alone) cannot save a sinking ship. Don’t we know that?
But Rachel tells these stories like it’s totally healthy to expect toxic habits to change on their own. Or, if we want them bad enough. Sure,she realized that she deserved to be respected and told the man to quit calling her. She told him she no longer wanted any contact. Good for her, no?
Well, he showed up on her doorstep the next morning, and surprise — they’re now married! She writes about a toxic fantasy that is her real life and doesn’t seem to see the problem at all.
None of what she describes in Girl, Wash Your Face is grounds for a healthy dating relationship let alone a marriage. But this is the garbage she’s been pushing. Not that they legitimately worked through their toxic habits together, but that everything worked out when she realized her worth.
It’s not shocking that the Hollis’s marriage is ending. It’s shocking that people ever believed in it at all.
Considering everything she’s already written about her dating relationship with her husband, it’s not shocking that things haven’t worked out. Longevity is not the litmus test of a healthy relationship. It’s the healthy habits that are literally proof of your healthy relationship.
I recognize a lot of the Hollis brand relationship advice from my past experiences with pentecostal and evangelical Christianity. The difference with Rachel is that she’s a bit of a mish-mash personality, combining aspects of Christianity, toxic positivity, feminism lite, and a hefty dose of oblivious privilege.
I’m not surprised that she and her husband are getting divorced. I’m more surprised that so many of her readers have accepted and bought her disingenuous stories. The ones where she talks about being honest but clearly can’t be honest with herself.
That’s because things like self-respect and self-improvement aren’t mere mantras you simply repeat until you “get there.” These things take a whole lot of work, like soul-searching and accepting when we need to change. And by the way, if we define a healthy boundary in a relationship and the other person breezes right past it, that’s not romantic. That’s not love.
But Rachel Hollis is selling a very specific brand. She wants women to feel like they too can become cute and quirky, like a perfectly imperfect success story. They don’t even need to do any heavy lifting if they wish to emulate her. It’s easy.
Like Rachel, privileged women can appropriate or plagiarize the words of others, and repeat the supposedly no-nonsense mantras.
Let’s be honest, even though she hasn’t been honest with us. People love the hype and the fairytale, so she hasn’t even bothered to give them something real.
She’s committed one of the most abominable acts in writing — expecting more from her reader than she expects from herself.
Rachel Hollis is what happens when you try to convince yourself that bad shit tastes good. Her methods aren’t healthy or reasonable, but they sure do sell those books.
I was particularly disturbed to read last night where Rachel wrote:
“That said, having been such an open book to this beloved community, we hope that you can allow us a human moment. We hope you can understand our need to process these changes away from social media. We graciously ask that you respect our privacy so we can focus on what matters most, our four kids and the next chapter of what our family looks like now.”
The implication here is that she and her husband have been superhuman for you. That they’ve performed a great service for your sake which has been so very tough on them.
After weaseling her way into so many women’s ears to say they need a dose of tough love, she takes on none of it for herself. In essence, she expects far more from her readers than she ever expects from herself but that seems to be her shtick.
Here’s my guess…
She’s going to keep on telling you how to be honest and authentic without being either of those things herself. She’s going to tell you to quit making excuses while she explains there was nothing she could do to save her marriage, despite constantly preaching that you can have a happy marriage if you simply make it happen. Like this gem from her blog:
“You Have to Choose a Happy Marriage – Every morning you wake up and you get a choice. You get to choose your perspective. You get to choose how you’ll approach the day. You get to choose happiness. Every morning I want to wake up and choose to be a kind mother. I want to choose to be a good friend. I want to choose joy in my marriage. By choosing to have a happy marriage you’re more forgiving, more kind, more willing to laugh together and look for special moments to connect. Believe me, I don’t always get there but if I start the day with the intention I’m far happier than I am without it. Whether you’ve been married eleven years or fifty or a week and a half, you get to choose how to go through life together. Choose to be happy.”
But the damage has been done. She’s encouraged all sorts of toxic thinking patterns and behavior in her quest to live her best life. She’s like the Joel Osteen of sorta religious but sorta secular self-help. And I have no doubt that she and her husband will use their divorce to sell even more books and speaking engagements — all without doing any of the work it takes actually do better.
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