Symphony of Destruction
by Anna Merlan
I started watching TikTok videos as research for work, but in the way bad habits tend to do, this one eventually bled outwards into the rest of my life. Now, while doing chores around the house, any time there’s some dead air I want to fill, I inevitably open TikTok, ready to be sucked into a hypnotic whirlpool of other women’s misery.
This isn’t an accident; TikTok’s algorithm is worryingly good—some would say addictive—and the app has clocked with 100 percent accuracy that I would like to hear about terrible relationships, worse breakups, unreconstructed bigamy, and strained co-parenting relationships. TikTok offers an endless wellspring of these stories: women doing their makeup while calmly narrating how they’ve been done hellaciously wrong; the woman who realized that her husband has had a second family for the past decade; the woman who found out about her live-in boyfriend’s cheating habit from searching his recently deleted iPhone apps; the multitude of women practicing “parallel parenting” with ex-husbands who can’t be reasoned with; the worrying number of very young women observing that their 19-year-old boyfriends seem to hate them and hold them in real contempt. I’ve watched hundreds of these disturbing narratives, a stressful little buzz in my ear while I'm trying to live my own life and conduct my own relationship. TikTok’s endless scroll feature also means that one video bleeds into the next, which makes the experience feel like a stream of interchangeable women telling me, with varying degrees of outrage or calm or tears, about the whole world’s one, singular bad boyfriend.
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