Like Mollie From "The Traitors", I Know What It's Like to Have a Man Use You For Money

Or, when it comes to love, are we all just out for what we can get?

Photo by Gabriel Meinert on Unsplash

Like around 6.5million people in the UK, I spent last Friday night peaking from behind my fingers at the finale of reality TV show, The Traitors. If my Twitter was anything to go by, we all knew what was going to happen and we were all desperate for a last minute intervention that would stop it. But the intervention didn’t come and so 6.5million people watched a 19 year old girl trust a 22 year old boy with £95,000, and lose it all.

If you haven’t been watching The Traitors then I’m going assume you’re not particularly interested in it and so don’t need a full series run-down from me. What you do need to know to understand the rest of this column is this: the aim of the series is to win money. You can either take that money as a team (the “faithfuls”) or you can steal the money by convincing everyone you’re part of the team and if they believe you, you get to steal it all (a “traitor”). Along the way people are voted out until at the very end we were left with one faithful (Mollie, Gen Z’s answer to Barbie) and one traitor, (Harry, her treacherous Ken).

The two had been friends since the beginning of the series, bonding about being the youngest on the programme and having that fun friendship where you both quite fancy each other but you’re also both with other people so it’s never going to go anywhere and you can have a bit of a safe flirt. (NB Traitors fans, I like Harry a lot and think he played a great game but I will put money on him having described his relationship to Mollie as, “I’m kind of seeing someone but it’s not that serious.”) The show came down to whether Mollie believed Harry was a traitor or not. All the evidence said he was. But Mollie chose to believe him and in doing so, she lost the money.

Since the finale, Twitter has been alive with people questioning how she could have gone against all the evidence. There are long threads detailing all the times Mollie should have seen that Harry was a traitor. People have pointed out her failings time and time again. And, most cruelly in my opinion, they’ve mocked her for having her head turned by a pretty boy who never really cared about her in the first place. But when I watched Mollie choose to believe someone she cared about, I didn’t see an idiot who’d let herself by played, I saw someone who chose to care for her friend above herself. Yes, that was foolish. Yes, it was a lesson hard-learned. But I’d also argue that having that belief in people is worth a lot more than she’d have ever won.

A few years ago I dated a man who was on his uppers. He was honest with me from the start, explained that he’d been in a good place financially but had made some bad decisions that had led to debt and stress. He was finding his way out of it, he promised, and he didn’t want to rely on me for anything so maybe we should stop seeing each other until he’d sorted himself out? Don’t be silly, I said. As long as you’re on top of it, as long as you know I’m not going to save you from this, then we’ll be fine. You look after yourself and I’ll look after myself, that’s the deal.

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

At first we were fine. Our relationship was on a budget constrained by his money worries but I was happy with that. He was busy interviewing for jobs and coming up with side hustles, so I really didn’t think it would be forever. We had the best time just being in each other’s company, we didn’t need anything more than that. When someone makes you laugh, makes you feel seen, you can ignore a lot of red flags. Like the fact that they lose their bank card a lot and so regularly need to borrow £20 to get through the weekend, which you lend them without thinking about it. They promise they’ll pay you back when their card comes through but they never do. And it’s a small amount so you forget about it, until the next time.

Or when they come home one day, clearly upset and panicked. You ask them what’s going on and they tell you that they’re scared they won’t be able to pay a loan payment this month. You want to help but also don’t want to get into the dynamic of giving them money so you suggest the two of you collaborate on a work project together and then split the profit. You do it and it goes well, money is made, the loan payment is made and peace returns. Until a few months later when the same thing happens. This time they ask you if you’ll take a loan out for them to “invest”, they have an idea that they think could make lots of money and solve all their problems but they just need some start up capital. You refuse and there’s a massive row. You don’t back down but you do say you’ll give them the cash for the loan for a few months, just so they can stop worrying and get back to job hunting. A few months pass. Nothing changes.

And finally you’re breaking-up and they’re begging you to forgive them, to please let them stay. You don’t know whether they mean it or whether they’re just scared to lose the back-up bank account that you have become. So you say you’ll give them enough money to be sorted for a few months but they have to leave. The begging to stay stops. They leave and you transfer the money. A few days later they ask you for a quick top-up because they’ve accidentally put some money in an account that they can’t get it out of easily, they’ll pay it straight back. That’s when you finally know - you should have known before but hope is a beautiful thing - they’re using you.

I’ve written “you” a lot in the past few paragraphs. Of course, what I mean is “I”. But it’s hard to say that because, like I saw on Mollie’s face the second she realised what had happened, I still can’t believe I was quite that stupid. I grew up in a household with a similar dynamic and I swore I would never repeat it, and yet I had. I had traded financial security for what I thought was a mutually loving relationship and I got burned by it.

When I saw the internet burn Mollie for being an idiot, for choosing to back Harry even though it made no logical sense, I completely understood why she had done it. Because if she’d called him out in that moment, if she’d admitted to herself that he’d deceived her, then she has to question all the times he made her laugh or told her she was doing a great job or listened to her when she was worried about something or helped her through a difficult challenge. She would have to look back at all those memories and ask herself, “were they real? Or was he just using me all along?” and losing £95,000 is nothing in comparison to losing the trust in your own memories.

It’s several months on since Mollie had to choose between friendship and money, and in the few interviews I’ve listened to from her since then, she’s been keen to emphasise that she and Harry are still friends, that she understands it’s all part of the game and it hasn’t impacted their relationship. Perhaps that’s completely true and if so, I admire her! It took me far longer than a few months to unpick what happened in my own relationship. My poor therapist had to listen to me go round and round on the question of “but did he ever really care about me?” for a good few years. Occasionally I still come back to it but slowly I’m beginning to trust the answer I came to. So if Mollie is still questioning how much of her friendship with Harry was real, this is what I’d tell her:

All humans have priorities and the greatest of those priorities is survival. When we are in survival mode, it becomes the only thing that matters. Perhaps survival mode has been triggered by debt and fear, perhaps it’s been triggered by a game show - the impact is the same. A human becomes so focussed on the goal of survival that while they might care about other things around them, they can’t stop for them, they must keep going towards the goal. Those memories you have with Harry, they’re real. The feelings are real, the connection is real. But for Harry, in his place of survival, they weren’t the priority. Maybe it seems like he won but in the long-term, you did. One day you will look back on those memories and think about how lucky you are to have been in a place where you could appreciate the connection, enjoy the emotions. You will look back at them and see a woman who trusted and loved, you’ll see how brave that is. He will look back on them and feel guilt. Out of the two of you, I’d choose to be you every time.

And don’t worry, next time, you’ll know to take the cash.

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