After publicly proclaiming on this very website a year ago that I was done watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, it should come as a surprise to no one that I nevertheless locked the hell in for Season 2. (Listen, I contain multitudes!) And while my love for star Jen Affleck—no, not that one—knows no bounds, the Mormon mom who most captured my heart the second time around was one Ms. Taylor Frankie Paul—so you can imagine my delight when I learned on Wednesday that she had been cast as the next star of The Bachelorette.
The Bachelorette has produced some of my very favorite pop-cultural phenomena (hello, Gabby Windey!), but with the exception of Season 8 star Emily Maynard, most of the women who appear on the show looking for their ideal mate don’t yet have children. By casting Paul, who shares two children with her ex-husband, Tate Paul, and welcomed a third with her now ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen last year, The Bachelorette actually stands to send a pretty powerful message about the potential of mothers to completely change their lives in the wake of divorces and breakups.
Given that the Mormon Church continues to discourage divorce, a mom of three who rose to fame partly through her Mormon identity seeking a new partner on a mega-successful dating show is also kind of striking. It’s no secret that Paul has been through the wringer when it comes to love and family; she publicly dealt with, among other things, a miscarriage and a domestic violence arrest on Season 1 of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and Season 2 largely revolved around her messy split with Mortensen. That she now gets to flirt and date and consider folding a new person into her young family in front of millions of people challenges the taboo, so common in intensely religious environments, that it’s some shameful thing to be a single mom.
I’m nothing if not a fan of the party mom, and as the daughter of a divorced-and-remarried mother, I’ve always hated the idea that our identities as women can be distilled to our previous romantic relationships, whether we’re religious or not. Paul is no perfect person—who among us is?—but I, for one, look forward to watching her prove on national TV that being a mother doesn’t mean you can’t mess up, heal, do better, and even find love again—or at least try.
