It’s rare that a scandal within the Bravoverse breaks out of the network’s fandom. But there’s a romantic drama playing out on Season 10 of the show “Summer House,” which is about a group of friends in a Hamptons share, that is so juicy, yet still relatable, it broke containment.
The second of three reunion episodes — where castmates rehash the events of the season and what happened after — aired last night. For those of you who aren’t down in the muck with me, a quick summary: Longtime castmates Amanda and Kyle got married in a previous season of the show, but their relationship has been in shambles for a while, and they announced their split in January. Another castmate, Ciara, who has also been on “Summer House” for several seasons, was dating West, a newer addition, on and off. West generally acted like a cad.
Amanda and Ciara had been close friends, and Ciara was extremely supportive of Amanda while her marriage was falling apart. But now Amanda and West are together — something castmates suspected for a while, and that the pair lied about repeatedly.
If you’re still with me after all that, you should know that Amanda’s lies about her personal life began unraveling because she had been sharing her phone’s location with Ciara (as well as other friends, her management and her ex). Earlier this year, Ciara was trying to reach Amanda, who didn’t respond quickly. Ciara saw that Amanda was at West’s apartment. Then, Kyle and Ciara both noticed Amanda started turning her location off, which she had apparently never done in the previous five years. This all looked very shady!
I’m about 10 years older than these women, and I had two main responses to this: Amanda is a crummy friend, and why the heck is she sharing her location with so many people?
I would never voluntarily share my phone’s location with another living soul — not even my husband of 16 years. But I especially would not be sharing my location if I were going through a divorce. I would want total freedom from anybody else’s monitoring of my movements through the world.
I did a nonscientific, casual survey of friends and colleagues, and there seemed to be a real generational divide: Roughly, anybody under 35 seemed to think location sharing was no big deal, and one shared her phone location with 34 people (I joked that I was worried she would end up on “Dateline” after they found her body in the East River).
People over 35 said they might share their location briefly if they were going someplace dangerous, or needed to find someone at a crowded concert. But they did not share as a default. Most of them felt that having their movement tracked was invasive and micromanaging. I spend the majority of my time in my own house, and imagining someone watching my unmoving blue dot on a screen is completely unnerving.
My speculation is that if you grew up with social media and your parents tracked your location, being surveilled and surveilling loved ones seems less like an issue. (If you’re already on a reality show, you must have a high degree of openness to airing your business to the wider public anyway.)
This isn’t really new; location sharing among the youth has been common for over a decade. In 2022, The Times’s Kalley Huang wrote about how sharing one’s location had become a litmus test of close friendship for people in their 20s, and described one way it can cause unhappiness: If you see your friends hanging out without you, that’s going to feel awful. For couples, sharing your location can be either a sign of trust or a creepy and possibly manipulative intrusion.
You might be wondering if I track my kids. I refuse to track them on principle, because I want them to feel the same freedom I had growing up.
Trust — or lack of it — plays a strong role in how people feel about location tracking. Personality traits and attachment style may also affect how a person perceives location tracking, said Randi Smith, a professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver who has studied location-sharing practices in romantic partnerships. For people who have a history of bad or unfaithful relationships, or a high level of neuroticism, location sharing may just “accentuate their feelings of insecurity,” said Smith, who is also a psychotherapist in private practice.
Sinead Smyth, a family therapist based in California, thinks there are enormous, and mostly negative, implications to location sharing for couples and friends. “It generates more suspicion and questions than it provides answers,” Smyth wrote in an email. “What happens if the partner turns off the sharing? It inserts the notion of wrongdoing into a relationship unnecessarily, which can lead to increased defensiveness, secrecy, conflict and lower trust.”
Which is all to say: One’s time is probably better spent actually communicating directly with friends and lovers and building trust through words and deeds, rather than passively monitoring someone’s location and trying to play gotcha. Even just checking in to see if a loved one is safe may bring more anxiety than relief — what if he or she is someplace strange and not answering texts?
To bring it back to “Summer House,” Ciara had good reason to be skeptical of both West and Amanda. She used location tracking to show the pair to be snakes, and laid out the dates and times of their transgressions with prosecutorial precision.
It made for very, very good TV. But it is definitely not the way I would ever want to live my life — one young person Kalley Huang interviewed said it felt like “a stab” when friends stopped sharing their location. Who needs that extra pain and status consciousness?
Surveillance isn’t always the basis of a solid bond.
End Notes
-
Thank you to those of you who emailed me about your job hunts — I’m still going through the responses. I’m looking for even more job seekers, so if you are out of work, or entering the job market for the first time, I want to hear from you. Click hereto answer a survey about your experience looking for work in 2026.
-
I am reading a really excellent true crime book, “A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed,” by Scott Eden. It is about the murder of Tushar Atre, who made a lot of money in Silicon Valley and then was trying to grow his fortune by getting into the marijuana business in Santa Cruz. It’s a fascinating history of the weed market in California over the years as marijuana changed legal status. It also reminded me of my most frequently used proverb: You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
The post ‘Summer House’ and the Perils of Wanton Location Sharing appeared first on New York Times.
