If you watched the Vanderpump Rules Season 5 finale on Monday, then you bore witness to a (clearly staged) scene in which Scheana Marie and Mike Shay decided to call it quits.
While most of the season focused on the Katie Maloney-Tom Schwartz wedding, producers occasionally took a moment to address the ongoing issues in the ill-fated Shay marriage.
Though the topic was given surprisingly little screen time, we developed a sense of the main hurdles Scheana and Shay were struggling to overcome:
There was her suspicion that Shay was back on drugs, his sudden workaholism (especially strange coming from a man whose income from 2012-2016 = $ 0.00), the fact that he seemed increasingly annoyed by her annoying group of friends, etc.
But it wasn’t until this past week that we learned that Shay had betrayed Scheana’s trust in a far worse fashion than we originally thought.
In fact, he committed the cardinal sin of just about any marriage.
We’re talking of course about his decision to make atrocious hip hop with Nicole Arbour.
We kid! (Kind of.)
We now know that Shay was unfaithful to Scheana (at least in the form of explicit texts to an unknown recipient).
Amazingly, Scheana (who was previously derided by fans for her overbearing behavior toward her husband) was willing to overlook the infidelity and continue to work on her marriage.
As Shay continued to spiral out of control and become more and more detached, however, she eventually realized that the relationship was a lost cause.
Now, she’s revealing that she feels partially responsible for her ex-husband’s downward spiral.
Scheana broke down the breakdown in a recent interview with E! News:
“There were a lot of things from the beginning of our marriage that kind of tainted the whole relationship. Three months in I found out he had a pill problem. Right before our one-year anniversary, I saw some inappropriate text messages,” said Scheana
“Then, fast forward to our second anniversary, and I’m just trying to pretend like everything’s fine, because in my mind, we’re married—for better or for worse.”
Scheana says she and Shay were able to rebuild their marriage between seasons of Vanderpump, but when the show started filming again, she became distracted and he went off the rails:
“In the beginning of 2016, everything was genuinely good. Then the cameras turned on again, and then he changed. That’s when I found out he started using again. I didn’t know that at the time,” Scheana said.
“My mom and other people around me had noticed a change in his behavior. I was either oblivious to it or I just didn’t want to believe what I was seeing right in front of my face.”
Yes, despite her previous comments to Andy Cohen that reality stardom had no negative impact on her marriage, Scheana is now admitting that the spotlight may have been too much for Shay to handle.
These days Scheana is dating Robert Valletta and says she has zero contact with Shay.
It seems that while fans of the show were fretting over what appeared to be the unraveling of Tom and Katie’s relationship, a different tragedy was unfolding right under our noses.
Okay, maybe “tragedy” is a strong word, but c’mon…
making hip hop with Nicole Arbour? That’s pretty damn sad.
