Emily Hexton: How Her Short Presence In Love Life Season 2 Became The Most Significant In Marcus’ Story – And How She Wasn’t Actually His Victim In The End

Arian Moayed played Dr. Andy on the latest season of Nobody Wants This. He was Morgan’s therapist and fiancé. In the previous blog entry, we explored the very problematic and unethical relationship between Morgan and Dr. Andy, and we explained why exactly that relationship was crucial for her character’s development and growth. The entire storyline might’ve given the entire fandom the ick. It certainly gave me the ick. By the season’s end, however, especially the last 10 minutes of the latest season’s finale, you also realize just how crucial Dr. Andy was for Morgan’s character arc. You can read all about it in the previous post, but only after you read THIS one!

Before he starred as Dr. Andy, Moayed appeared on season 2 of Love Life. The series, now available to stream on Netflix, starred Anna Kendrick as Darby Carter in season 1 and William Jackson Harper as Marcus Watkins in season 2. Just as a fun fact, Harper starred alongside Kristen Bell, who portrays Joanne on Nobody Wants This, as her love interest Chidi Anagonye on The Good Place, which originally aired between 2016 and 2020. The series also starred Ted Danson, Jamila Jameel, Manny Jacinto, and D’Arcy Carden, who also appeared as a guest star on Nobody Wants This.

Marcus’ story begins in season 2 of Love Life. He was introduced as a guest at Darby and Magnus’ wedding (more on them in the next post). He was there with his wife, Emily, who was Magnus’ co-worker at the time. Marcus didn’t seem to enjoy the wedding at all. All throughout, he seemed agitated and nervous. He just wanted to leave. So while Emily was having the time of her life celebrating the bride and groom, Marcus stepped outside for some fresh air. It was there that he met Mia, another guest at the wedding.

Marcus and Mia connect immediately. They show a bond a mutual respect for one another. Only later did he reveal to her that he was married. She didn’t care as she had a boyfriend of her own. They exchanged numbers before going their separate ways, and in the days and weeks following the wedding, communicated and spent time together more and more despite both of them being in relationships, obviously not happy ones. Neither of them cared that they were in other relationships. They just wanted to have each other for as long as they could; Marcus especially.

Nothing sexual happened between the two of them. And yet, Marcus still felt he had something to hide from Emily. Every waking moment, Marcus would eagerly look for the opportunity to text Mia; to see her; to get to know her on a deeper level. He shared something with her that, along the way, he’d lost with Emily. For a time, it seemed as though Marcus wished he’d been with Mia over Emily. Following Marcus seeing Mia’s boyfriend after he came to her place to leave a care package for her, their friendship seemed to have abruptly ended. Marcus was relieved to be able to go back to his ‘normal life’. He convinced himself to go back to Emily. Marcus came home to find Emily sitting in the living room. She was angry. But even more so, she was hurt. She discovered his text messages with Mia via the cloud, which mock Emily and say marrying her was a mistake.

Honestly, my heart broke for Emily at that moment. I can’t even imagine being in her shoes. Like her and Marcus, my husband and I have been together since a very young age. Of course we’ve had our share of problems. Of course there were times we thought of giving up. Of course there were some moments of doubting whether or not we were doing the right thing by staying together. I even connected with another man on a deep emotional level as my husband and I were on the verge of a separation. But never, EVER, no matter hard things got, would I call our marriage, or relationship as a whole, a mistake.

Whether emotional cheating is worse than physical cheating remains debatable. Some don’t even consider emotional cheating as cheating. As a woman who’d been cheated on both emotionally and physically (neither by my husband), with confidence, I can tell you that emotional cheating is MUCH worse than physical cheating. Unlike physical cheating, emotional cheating involves a profound betrayal of emotional intimacy, a deeper erosion of trust, and can lead to a more complicated recovery process. While a physical affair may be seen as a momentary lapse, an emotional affair often involves a sustained, intimate connection that shares the thoughts, feelings, and emotional support that should be exclusive to the primary relationship. This can make it more devastating to realize that the emotional foundation of the partnership has been secretly undermined. To break it down more thoroughly:

Emotional betrayal of trust

• Erosion of intimacy: Emotional infidelity involves sharing deep thoughts, feelings, and emotions with someone outside the relationship, which can directly interfere with the ability to connect with a partner.

• Profound betrayal: This type of cheating can feel like a deeper betrayal because it involves giving a part of your heart and emotional support to someone else, the very things that are the foundation of a partnership.

• Secrecy: The secretive nature of the emotional bond can be particularly jarring and can lead to a significant loss of confidence and trust in the relationship’s viability. 

Deeper and more complicated impact

• Long-term intensity: Unlike a one-time physical act, an emotional affair can develop and evolve over a long period, making it harder to disengage from and sometimes feeling like a “loss of something very special” for the person who had it.

• Complex recovery: The betrayal of an emotional affair can be more complicated to recover from because it’s not a physical act to “undo,” but rather an emotional connection to untangle. It can be difficult to turn off those emotions, even after the affair ends.

• Gateway to other issues: Some view emotional affairs as a gateway that can easily lead to physical infidelity, making them particularly dangerous for the health of the primary relationship. 

Psychological effects

• Intense emotional distress: A partner who discovers an emotional affair can experience shock, sadness, anger, and deep feelings of betrayal, which can lead to long-term psychological effects such as anxiety and depression.

• Undermined security: The realization that a partner has been sharing intimate parts of their life with someone else can shatter a person’s sense of security and self-worth within the relationship. 

Marriage isn’t a joke. It’s not something you can just get comfortable in and just assume that the person next to you will be there for you forever. Marriage takes a lot of hard work to make it last, especially in the long run. It’s not a rom-com. Usually, the ending of a rom-com IS the wedding. But in life, in real life, that ending is just the beginning of the story. Being a newlywed is fun and exciting. It’s nothing compared to being married (to the same person) for 10 years.

People constantly change and evolve. Life doesn’t look the same in your 30’s as it did in your 20’s. My husband and I met in our early 20’s, and we’re NOT the same people that we once were back when we met. The thing that makes our marriage work is that we’re constantly evolving together and getting to know each other on a regular basis. The more years of us being together, the more I understand what it means for a couple to grow old together.

As the very first episode progressed, it became more and more evident that even though they were married, Marcus and Emily lived two completely separate lives. They might as well have been roommates than a married couple. They weren’t growing together. They were growing apart. They were growing as individuals. Emily knew exactly who she was. She knew exactly where she was in her life and where she was headed. She was content with what she had. She had a job that she loved, and, in her mind, she had a partner who loved her. Marcus, on the other hand, had an identity crisis.

Marcus wasn’t just unhappy in his marriage to Emily. He was unhappy with life in general. There were many aspects of Marcus’ life that I, as a a white woman, didn’t understand. For instance, when he was confronted by an author that he was trying to sign, the author compared to Obama and said that he was “safe and nonthreatening”. When he later asked Emily who he reminded her of, she said Obama because he was always calm and in control. Without realizing it herself because, like me, Emily is a white woman, Marcus took it as an offence. This is something only a Black person would understand, and I guess this is where the real issue and mismatch in Marcus and Emily’s marriage cracked open for Marcus. It was something he didn’t think about when they first got together and built a life together. His experience was unique and only relevant to people of colour because generations of oppression and the often violent pressure to assimilate into white culture came into play. With all that being said, Marcus started to question whether he made the right decision marrying outside of his race.

If I could compare a mixed-race relationship, it’d be a comparison between a mixed-race relationship to an interabled relationship. In my own case, unless the other person I ever dated had cerebral palsy, they didn’t understand my life and what I’d gone through. Unlike Marcus, though, I never questioned whether I made the right choice to end up and build my life with an able-bodied person. In fact, I prefer it that way.

I made a very conscious decision early on in my dating life to never be with a disabled person; particularly someone who, like me, had cerebral palsy. In my own personal view, the relationship wouldn’t work. We’d be too similar; the same even. There’d be nothing I’d be learning from them, and they wouldn’t learn anything from me. There’d be absolutely nothing that neither of us could give or take from the relationship. It’d be just exactly how Marcus viewed his relationship with Emily – stagnant, boring, and bland.

One thing that’s a determinant factor in making a relationship between two people work isn’t love. Love isn’t enough to make a relationship work. Marcus loved Emily, but he didn’t like her very much. Most of the time that she was with him in that first episode of his story, it seemed as though he was aggregated by her presence and he couldn’t wait for her to leave so that he could have a chance talk to Mia. This had a lot to do with the fact that Mia was Black. Marcus felt that she understood him and where he came from better than his own wife did. And she probably did, but I saw it as being more than just about him and Emily being a mixed-race couple. In fact, this had nothing to do with race. Instead, it had everything to do with Marcus and his failure to communicate with and educate Emily on the matter at hand.

Marcus failed to communicate and be honest with Emily about his true feelings; about his insecurities and vulnerabilities; about his unhappiness and the disconnect he felt in the marriage. He began to question their entire relationship and its validity, and instead of communicating this with her, he embarked on an emotional affair with someone else. Even more so, he said things to the woman he was seeing behind his wife’s back that he should’ve been saying to his wife. But really hurt Emily the most wasn’t even the fact that he was seeing someone else behind her back. It was that he told the other woman that his marriage to Emily was a mistake.

It wasn’t that Emily was blind to the fact that her marriage was crumbling. She saw right through Marcus’ change of behaviour towards her. She tried to make it work. She asked questions she wanted answers to. Like, whether they were okay or not. Marcus, in turn, brushed it off and told her that everything was okay between them. The answer wasn’t very assuring, and Emily certainly knew that. She just didn’t know that he was seeing someone else behind her back, nor did she know he was telling the other woman such crude commentary about her.

M. Scott Peck of Further Along The Road Less Traveled once said, ‘Self-love implies the care, respect, and responsibility for and the knowledge of the self. Without loving one’s self one cannot love others.’ This, in a nutshell, perfectly sums up Marcus as a character. From the get-go, Marcus was unlikeable. I’d go as far as saying he was insufferable. It was only the fact that William Jackson Harper was the one that portrayed him that made him bearable to watch. He struggled with his identity, and therefore struggled to dominate the altering world of his life. He treated everyone like…utter shit. He was whiney, slightly pretentious, kind of a mess, passive-aggressive, narcissistic, selfish, dishonest with himself and others, and self-pitying.

In the events that followed his divorce, Marcus loved to play the victim card. He didn’t blame Emily for it, but he did put the blame on everyone else, and that included Mia. She didn’t allow him to get on her nerve when he confronted her, and rightfully so. It wasn’t her fault that he’d settled for someone like Emily at a young age. Love isn’t a straight line, sometimes it’s a big ball of wibbly-wobbly lovey-dovey stuff; like Marcus probably thought it was. Love is messy. Love is hard work. In longevity, you fall in love with the person over and over again. That’s exactly where Marcus went wrong in his marriage. Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped falling in love with Emily.

Mia became a major figure in Marcus’ life, but they weren’t together romantically. They obviously liked each other very much, but they couldn’t be together; not unless they BOTH worked on themselves first and foremost. By the end of the season, they work things out and find their way back to each other. They even have a baby together. But it took a lot of time and effort to get there. There were many in-betweens. This included getting another white woman pregnant following a meaningless one-night stand. She decided to keep the baby, which was a decision Marcus accepted and supported. Sadly, she decided to go through with a D&C when tests results detected that the baby had Down Syndrome and she’d miscarry. This also included Marcus finally accepting his circumstances and faults; admitting to himself that he was completely in the wrong and treated people he’d claimed to love like shit and move on. It’s something his friends, Yogi and Kian helped him realize for himself; once and for all.

On a glamping trip that the three friends went to together, Kian revealed to Marcus that he’d been dating Emily for the past two months. Though he initially showed his supportive nature, Marcus obviously was bothered by it. Having confronted him of his newfound love with his ex-wife that he was obviously always in love with, Kian revealed that unlike what Marcus said, his divorce WAS his business because he was the one who had to clean up the mess he made of Emily. He revealed to Marcus that following the divorce, Emily had to move to her parents’ basement and had a severe case of Psoriasis due to stress. This was the exact moment Marcus realized the consequences his actions had on his ex-wife.

It was at the glamping trip that Marcus was finally able to get closure on the exact thing that was holding him back. After a night filled with mishaps, Kian called Emily to pick them up to go home. This was the first time that Marcus saw her following their divorce. Marcus approached her, gave her his blessing for her to date Kian (not like she needed it), and apologized for everything that happened between them. Emily didn’t expect the apology from him, nor did she seem to have looked for it. Nevertheless, she accepted it and told him she hoped he’d find what he was looking for. This very brief but significant exchange made Marcus confront his own shortcomings, self-doubt, and inability to be his authentic self. To break it down more thoroughly:

• Challenging his identity: Marcus often felt he couldn’t fully express his Black identity and share cultural jokes or observations with Emily, who is white. Her attempts to comfort him (e.g., comparing him to LeVar Burton or Barack Obama) highlighted her limited understanding of Black culture and masculinity, making Marcus question his own Blackness and feel a lack of genuine connection.

• Highlighting relationship flaws: The marriage to Emily appeared stable on the surface, but a chance meeting with Mia revealed the existing cracks. This forced Marcus to realize that he had “fallen in love with a version” of Emily that no longer existed, and that he was clinging to a fading relationship out of a fear of solitude, rather than actively working on it.

• The catalyst for change: The emotional affair with Mia and Emily’s subsequent discovery of their texts led to the immediate and painful end of the marriage. This devastating breakup and the ensuing period of being alone forced Marcus into a period of introspection and self-discovery.

• Learning self-acceptance: The failure of his marriage to Emily taught Marcus a profound lesson: true, healthy love isn’t about finding someone to “complete” him or rescue him from loneliness, but about becoming a whole person on his own. He had to learn to love and accept himself before he could be ready for a mature, mutually fulfilling relationship with Mia later on. 

Emily’s role in Marcus’ story, though short as seen in the series, was significant. Sometimes the person we thought we were meant to spend of our turns out to be not the person for you. Sometimes you wake up one day and realize you’re unhappy with them; and that’s exactly what happened in the very first episode. Though we didn’t see much of her in the 10 episode arc, she was somehow always there. Not in a physical sense, but a very emotional sense. Marcus’ journey had a lot to do with the way he treated Emily in how the marriage ended. He needed closure, and him seeing her again after something time had passed was exactly what he needed in order to fully move on and live his life – whether it was with Mia in the end or not.

The former spouses seeing each other following the breakup was the necessary, painful turning point that propelled Marcus on a journey of personal growth, ultimately leading him to a deeper understanding of himself and what real, healthy love entailed.