The A in Arionne Curry Must Be for Audacity

LAMH viewers are reacting to the delusion with which Arionne is attempting to rewrite the very history they watched unfold.

The A in Arionne Curry has to stand for audacity, because after watching her entrance into Love & Marriage: Huntsville, I really cannot come up with a better word. Audacity means having the nerve to do something bold, sometimes with very little regard for how it looks to everybody else, and that pretty much sums up what we are watching. I am trying to give Arionne some grace because she is a young woman, and as women we have all made decisions that we would probably handle differently with a little more age, wisdom and life behind us. None of us are perfect, and I am certainly not interested in pretending that being a married woman somehow makes any of us morally superior. But Arionne has not come onto this show humbled by the history. She has come in hot, angry and resentful, and she seems determined to settle scores with women whose biggest offense was not welcoming her when she was the mistress.

That is the part that makes this so hard to watch. Arionne seems genuinely angry that women like Tisha, Kimmi and Destiny did not embrace her relationship with Martell when he was married to Melody. She seems to have taken their disapproval personally, when I really do not think it was ever about Arionne personally. These were married women watching another married woman deal with her husband having an affair, and they responded from the position they were standing in at the time. They were wives. Arionne was the mistress. Those were simply the facts of the situation, and expecting married women to somehow make the mistress feel comfortable about an affair involving another married woman is where the audacity starts to become almost comical.

What makes it even harder to understand is that Arionne has now come onto a show titled Love & Marriage seemingly angry at the very construct of marriage because she was not welcomed into it. She has said things like “love wins,” Martell chose her, she is not going anywhere and she and Martell have a child together. She says those things as though they somehow elevate her relationship into a position that everyone else now has to respect simply because she says so. But Martell was married before. He had a wife, four children, businesses and a life with that wife, and none of those things guaranteed that marriage would last forever. So saying, “We have a child together,” as though that child is somehow the cement that a marriage certificate could not be, is strange when this man already has four children from a relationship that ended.

The irony gets even louder when Arionne becomes upset about people saying that she wanted Melody’s life. I am not saying she sat somewhere plotting to become Melody Holt, because I do not know that woman personally and I am not going to put intentions on her that I cannot prove. But I can absolutely talk about what it looks like. She is now sitting on a television platform that Melody helped create, with Melody’s former husband, surrounded by a group of people who were originally connected through Martell and Melody’s marriage, while insisting that she never wanted Melody’s life. There is something almost laughable about being offended by that comparison while literally occupying so many spaces that once belonged to the woman whose marriage you were involved in disrupting.

Then there is Destiny, and this is another place where Arionne loses me. She essentially wants Destiny cut off because Destiny did not support her relationship with Martell. Arionne actually said, “She’s cut off,” as though Destiny committed some unforgivable offense by not cheering for an affair involving a married man with four children. Destiny knew Martell as a husband and father, so her having an issue with what was happening was not some outrageous attack against Arionne. But Arionne seems to need everyone who did not validate that relationship back then to pay for it now. She is not just walking into this friend group. She appears to be walking in with a list.

As a Black woman and a married woman, I think that is the part that gives me the biggest pause. There is something about watching a woman resent wives because they valued marriage that feels backwards. Tisha and Kimmi wanting to protect their marriages does not make them foolish. It does not make them weak. It does not mean their marriages are perfect, because none of ours are. Martell himself has spent years publicly talking about regretting the loss of his marriage, so it is even stranger watching Arionne seemingly take up a battle against marriage that even Martell himself has acknowledged losing.

Arionne also seems determined to prove that these other husbands have been unfaithful, and that feels less like concern and more like vindication. If everybody’s husband cheated, then maybe in her mind nobody had the right to judge her. If everybody’s marriage is flawed, maybe she does not have to sit with why people viewed her relationship with Martell differently. But marriages being imperfect does not suddenly make every situation equal. Two wives choosing to stay in their marriages, work through whatever issues they have and protect their families is their decision, just like Arionne continuing a relationship with Martell is hers. The problem comes when she seems angry that their choice still carries a legitimacy that hers did not have when she entered the picture.

Even Martell appears to be trying to fit Arionne into pieces of the life he once had. When real estate came up and Arionne made it clear that she was not interested, Martell basically said she would come around. That stood out to me because real estate was part of the formula he had with Melody. They had marriage, family, business and television tied together, and now it feels like Martell is trying to rebuild some version of what he lost with a completely different woman. The problem is that Arionne is not Melody, and she should not have to be. But you cannot help noticing the irony when Arionne is angry about being compared to Melody while Martell himself appears to be trying to plug her into some of the same spaces Melody once occupied.

There is a bigger lesson in all of this about what happens when someone is brought into a space and immediately starts demanding authority over a structure they were never part of building. Arionne has every right to be on the show if the producers want her there, and she absolutely has a right to tell her side of the story. But credibility is not something you get simply because somebody finally hands you a microphone. Walking onto Love & Marriage: Huntsville and immediately coming for wives, friendships and marriages because those people did not approve of you when you were involved with a married man feels less like empowerment and much more like resentment finally getting a platform.

And I think that is why so many women watching are getting the ick from Arionne’s entrance. It is not simply because she was a mistress. People make mistakes, people fall in love under messy circumstances and life does not always happen in these neat little packages. I could actually have a tremendous amount of grace for a woman who came into this situation understanding the damage, understanding why people felt the way they felt and simply saying she is trying to move forward. But Arionne did not walk in asking for grace. She walked in demanding respect, demanding loyalty, telling people who needs to be cut off and seemingly ready to expose everybody else’s marriage because married women once had the nerve to judge an affair.

That is where the audacity lives for me. Arionne seems to want all of the credibility of being Martell’s woman today without any accountability for how she became Martell’s woman in the first place. She wants people to respect the relationship she has now while appearing to have very little respect for why these women valued the marriage he had before. She wants her child with Martell to represent permanence while ignoring the four children who came before him. And she wants to stand comfortably in a world that Melody helped build while being offended that anybody notices whose shoes she is standing in. The shoes may be available now, but every episode proves more and more that the shoes simply do not fit.

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