Summer House
Reunion Part 2
Season 10
Episode 18
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Clifton Prescod/Bravo
If the first part of this reunion was about Ciara’s anger and Amanda’s not-very-great reaction to it, then the second part of this reunion is all about West, who he really is as a person, and if anyone truly knows him. It’s unclear. What we do know for sure is that his strategy so far at this reunion is worse than Teresa Giudice singing “One Kiss.” (That’s a deep cut in celebration of Dua Lipa’s wedding.) It seems like his intent is to sit there like a crumpled Kleenex found at the bottom of your Nana’s purse and not say much. Seriously, Levi said more at this reunion, and the only sentence she uttered was, “Thank you for having me, Andy,” as she slunk back into an obscurity from which she will never leave.
Ironically, everything West says is pretty correct. When Amanda skulks off to cry in her dressing room, everyone shouts for him to go after her. He says that if he does that, they will just say that they both walked off and couldn’t take it. He’s right. Everyone on those couches is so justifiably angry at both him and Amanda that no matter what they do, the group is going to be unhappy with his performance, so he might as well do what he wants and not back up the woman taking all the heat for him. West apologizes for making fun of the Cartier watch that Kyle gave to Amanda, but he also tells Kyle that the way he spoke to Amanda this summer, and in general, is not the way a person should speak to anyone. Again, not wrong, even with everything that happened with Amanda since then. And, well, that’s all he says. As Amanda takes another drubbing, as he takes another drubbing, he just sits there like a Nerf ball, taking hit after hit and not moving, reacting, or even indenting a tiny little bit.
When they break for lunch at the end of the episode, Amanda asks West if he should jump in more. Yes. Yes, he should. This is just a replay of the reunion two seasons ago, where Ciara and everyone else came for him, and he let them control the narrative. This time it’s happening again, and, man, is the narrative a lot worse. We still have so little idea what West was thinking, how and why he got into this, and where he sees it going. The story is others to tell, and the story they’re telling about West is not a particularly good one.
There are two things in particular I’d like to draw attention to. The first is when Dara comes on stage, and Andy asks Dara how she feels about West, given that she’s dated him, been friends with him, and seen how he’s acted in this whole situation. At first, she says that he always wants to be liked and sees women as “expendable.” He agrees with this statement. Okay, admitting you have a problem is the first step, but, girl, there are 11 other steps. What else are you going to do about it? If you know that you treat women as expendable, how are you going to rectify that, because the person who always champions Amanda’s feelings, who cares about KJ’s mental health, who wants to support his friends, is not the kind of person who would treat women as expendable.
Amanda is away when Dara makes that first statement, so when she returns to the stage, Andy asks Dara if there’s anything she wants Amanda to hear, and she expounds on her previous statement. Here it is, in full, because it’s a doozy. “The biggest pattern in his life is that it is the West show and it will always be the West show, and the biggest concern of his, consistently, is being well-liked and well-received, and he doesn’t prioritize treating the women he is linked with romantically as he does anyone else in his life. I foresee him, for a long time, wanting someone to mold and fold and fit into his life without excuse or complaint, and it is up to you to decide what is worth breaking, sacrificing, and losing for that kind of person.” Okay. Dara wins. That’s it. Sums it up perfectly.
This leads to a line of questioning about Amanda going from one dominant personality to another dominant personality, and just how wise it is. Kyle says that West is just like him, but younger and on steroids. He’s the life of the party, he’s a flirt, he lights up every room, he likes to drink and stay out. Just like with Kyle, Amanda can coast in his wake. The past few seasons have all been about Amanda wanting to open up and find her own voice, but here her voice is once again getting lost in the roar of someone else. Maybe that’s what she’s looking for. Maybe what she really wants is to be smaller, to disappear, to “mold and fold and fit” into someone else’s life rather than having one of her own. Maybe, like Ciara said at the end of the last episode, that makes them the perfect match.
Many on the couches point out that Amanda is now going out at all hours with West, when that is exactly what she used to complain about with her husband. Kyle says that she always said she wanted to go out less, have a family, get a house in the suburbs, and settle down, and Amanda is now doing the exact opposite. “But I’m single!” she shouts as all of America rolls their eyes. The whole group says she hates going out. Then she says the thing that probably hurts Kyle the most. “I don’t hate going out, I hate going out with him.” She might as well have kicked him in the balls, ripped them off, put them in a blender, and then fed them to the Wirkus Twins because if there is one thing Kyle can’t handle, it’s that he’s not fun to party with.
But she makes some valid points. He would get blacked out drunk, he never wanted to leave the party, he would get belligerent and yell at her — she says that he wasn’t a very good time. Then we get some more revelations about Kyle and Amanda’s relationship and their breakup. She says that she decided it was over New Year’s Day because she was supposed to go out with Kyle and didn’t, and he ended up at a hotel in Hoboken at 8 a.m. without her, and she didn’t want to deal with it anymore. The worst part about this story is Hoboken. Kyle, my man, if you can’t keep it in your pants, at least keep it in the five boroughs.
Then, just how much Kyle was cheating becomes an issue. She says that he “stepped out on the marriage” and that he made out with other women or was “inappropriate,” which meant that he was getting drunk and asking other women to make out. He says that he did make out, but “making out isn’t fully cheating.” Oh, Kyle, I wish you were gay because this excuse would totally fly in about 90 percent of gay dude households. However, it flies in about 0 percent of heterosexual households. But Kyle insists that he never slept with anyone else, and Amanda seems to back that up by never asserting that he did. She says there were DMs and rumors constantly, but Carl, who was with him partying for many of those years, says he never witnessed Kyle doing anything that would jeopardize their relationship.
What they both agree on is that they didn’t have sex for four years. Four years! They did not bang even once after walking down the aisle. Not once. In the Catholic church, they could have annulled this entire union. I have joked in the past that if you are married and haven’t had sex in a year, that your marriage is open, whether you like it or not. If your partner isn’t going to fuck you, then you have the right to go out and find someone else. That is a joke, but also, is it? If Kyle wasn’t getting anything at home, how upset can she be that he was trying to get some physical affection from someone else? Yes, it’s a bit of a chicken or egg situation, that maybe Amanda couldn’t be with him physically because he made out with another girl when they were engaged. But then why marry him in the first place? Did she think it was just going to disappear? Yes, no one deserves to be cheated on, and Kyle could have been better about obeying the rules, but four years?
Since the breakup, Kyle has been making out with all sorts of Bravolebs, including his interlude with Meghan King Edmonds, where he was “on his tippies” as Lindsay hilariously put it, and also Salley Carson from Southern Charm. Someone needs to tell both Salley and her extraneous E to get the hell off my imaginary husband. We don’t need her thirst infiltrating its third Bravo show. (Yeah, she was on Southern Hospitality too, which you should really be watching.)
There are some non-Kymanda and Cest (Wiara?) things to talk about, but most of them get the short shrift. Jesse’s music career is going well, even though people online make fun of him. Carl and Lindsay are in a good place, even though Amanda is hurt that they monetized her scandal to make some branded content. Soft Bar is thriving, and Kyle and Carl are over their rift. Ben says a few things, and I put my hands up to my ears and shout, “LALALALALA, I can’t hear you,” until he’s done talking.
But really, the focus is mostly on the whole scandal and, more specifically, on West. Besides Dara’s statement, what TJ says about his own father sheds some light on West. TJ says his father was also the kind of guy who both wanted everyone to like him but also wanted to sleep around. That led him to lie about all sorts of things and “destroy their family.” West seems to have all of those impulses, and that makes him seem like so much more of a type, someone who just wants everything to be fun and has enough charisma that he can charm nearly everyone, but being a part of that is also detrimental to those closest to him.
At one point, early in this episode, Andy points out that Amanda was with Ciara when she was dealing with West’s inability to commit and asks why she thinks it will be different now. She says it’s because of the private conversations that they’ve had that made her believe that this is something special. But how many of those conversations has he had with all of these women? Did he tell Dara the same thing? Did he say that to Ciara the second time around? The question is, why does Amanda believe it, or rather, why is West willing to be with Amanda over those other people? Maybe it’s both of those questions at the same time, and you can’t answer one without the other.
As they retire for their lunch break, Ciara goes back into her dressing room and gets Meija, the woman that West was dating, on FaceTime. Kyle joins the conversation, too. We learned earlier in the hour that Kyle reached out to her to compare notes about what was going on with her and West, and that he introduced her to Ciara. The story that Meija tells is also quite damning. She says that she and West started dating exclusively in February and that she was staying in his house in New York every weekend they were filming in the Hamptons. As we saw him flirting with Ciara and trying to rekindle, he was keeping her stashed in New York to get with as soon as he returned. He said that their relationship was “hooking up every once in a while,” but this sounds like a lot more. Both Kyle and Ciara believe that and claim they have the receipts to prove it.
Meija says the reason that West kept her secret was that he said he would get fired from the show for dating someone who wasn’t in the Bravosphere. Kyle says that it’s bullshit, and history is on his side. Take Danielle, for instance, who dated Robert and a number of guys who barely appeared during her time on the show. Lindsay brought Stravy into the house and never made him a sandwich. There are past precedents for how that is not true. He also said he was trying to protect her from scrutiny because the fans would pit her against Ciara and would probably not like her, which, well, that’s true. But instead, what he’s going to do is sleep with someone on the show who was one of her best friends, thereby just transferring that hate to Amanda? It seems like a very convenient excuse so that he could have a secret girlfriend and continue sleeping with whomever he wanted because every lady in every sports bar in America thinks he’s single.
In their own dressing room, Amanda says, “It’s really frustrating. They’re just making me feel really fucking stupid for trusting you.” But are they making her feel like that, or is she just feeling like that based on the evidence? There are now three women — Ciara, Dara, and Meija (though Amanda hasn’t heard her story) — saying the exact same thing about West: he isn’t honest about his feelings, he’s hiding things, he’s being disrespectful to them, and he dropped them as soon as things got hard. But when he tells her she’s different, she believes it. Still, she can hear what these women are saying, two of whom are or were her friends. If and when this does end, she will absolutely feel really fucking stupid for trusting him.
Earlier, when Andy asked Amanda why she thought it would be different with her and West, she said, “I was going to have to be honest with Ciara no matter what. I felt embarrassed to say that I have feelings for and have kissed West and that he’s seeing someone else.” It was embarrassing to say it, but it should have been more embarrassing to do it. It should have been so embarrassing to stop her from kissing him to admit those feelings and not act on it because now, well, it’s that much worse, it’s that much more embarrassing, and if it ends the same way it ended with those other women, the worstness will be compounded exponentially. Mia, being perfect once again, tells her, “Yeah, it’s embarrassing,” but the future looks even worse. It looks like it will be humiliating.
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