Kyle Cooke and Amanda Batula, the ill-matched Summer House stars, announced their deeply inevitable separation last month.
For anyone who’s paid attention to the pair's ten-season run on the Bravo series, this development was about as shocking as getting sand in your swim trunks. The dynamic between boisterous, highly emotional Kyle and laconic, sarcastic Amanda has long crackled with the visceral tang of deep dislike. These two contemporaries may have enduring love for one another, but they couldn’t be less compatible.
Batula, 34, is a sensitive, laconic girls’ girl and a longtime close friend of glamorous podcaster Paige DeSorbo, who checked out of the show at the end of season 9. Batula hails from New Jersey and recently launched a capsule swimwear collection for women with large breasts. Cooke, 43, is a consummate party-boy beverage entrepreneur with a side hustle as a college-campus DJ that has irritated Batula to no end.
“I wanted him to stop going out late and partying, and he found a career where he goes out late and parties,” Batula told fellow Summer House cast member Ciara Miller in another recent episode.
Cooke is similarly sick of his partner. “The last two years, she smokes weed every night. My apartment smells like a frat house,” he intoned to his extremely fratty Summer House bros on a night out at a Hamptons social club. “It looks like a frat house, ‘cause she’s chaotically living.”
Onscreen, Amanda told Miller that fans of the show have so loudly clamored for her to divorce Cooke for so many years that she’d begun to have trouble distinguishing her own thoughts from the conclusions drawn by the collective consciousness of the internet.
The entire trajectory of this long day’s journey into night has been captured on reality TV. Amanda and Kyle made their relationship official in the season one finale. In season 3, rapidly-spreading rumors prompted Cooke to reveal to Batula that he’d cheated on her during a boys’ trip. Later that summer, they got engaged anyway.
Batula has made innumerable, heavily-documented attempts to forgive Cooke's transgressions. “I have the ring, I know that he loves me, the world has changed now that he’s serious about me, and I think that’s all that matters,” she said in 2019.
But as the years marched on and the couple’s wedding ceremony kept getting pushed back due to the Covid-19 pandemic—they married in 2021, in a backyard ceremony documented in Summer House's season six finale—the resentments between the two seemed to pile up and stagnate, like trash bags left unattended at the top of the stairs.
At one point, both Batula and Booke expressed interest in accumulating traditional markers of marriage: they both wanted to settle down in the suburbs and have kids. Sort of! I mean, they were thinking about it. But it never happened. Instead, they’ve drifted along semi-contentedly for years, pouring their energies into Cooke’s canned sparkling hard tea business, arguing over each others’ substance intake, adopting a couple of dogs.
A life spent at home caring for pets seems to suit Batula, a consummate introvert. But over ten seasons of reality television, it’s been made abundantly clear that Cooke is both a workaholic and everyone’s best friend. It’s in his nature to party till the wee hours every weekend and play to the crowd, but he struggles the most where it counts, which is in moments that call for communicating one-on-one with his wife.
In earlier seasons, watching Kyle and Amanda fight for—and over—their relationship despite their obvious differences could be wildly compelling. His boorish ranting and yelling was never acceptable, and neither was his selfishness; over the years, he’s managed to temper his emotional responses somewhat, even though he still storms off in a huff from a dinner table if someone even dares to giggle at something he says.
And Batula used to weep and despair over Cooke’s every wrong move. God, it was heartbreaking how much she loved him. They would quarrel passionately. Now? The force of her silent eye rolls could send your local lighthouse toppling into the ocean.
Unlike his Vanderpump Rules counterparts Jax Taylor and Tom Sandoval, Cooke doesn’t come off like an evil narcissistic monster. Kyle has severe man-baby traits, but his genuine loyalty to—and care for—his friends is as palpable as his tendency to cry on Amanda’s shoulder is irritating.
I’m more of a recent Summer House convert, after years as a dedicated Vanderpump Rules loyalist and scholar. When Scandoval broke in the spring of 2023, you’d better believe I had the time of my goddamn life chronicling every sordid twist and turn.
On O.G. Vanderpump Rules, romantic relationships had more of a tendency to implode in spectacular fashion due to the egomaniacal stars’ rampant abuse of cocaine, Adderall and alcohol. On Summer House, perhaps due to the tempering aura of East Coast modesty, the debauchery feels slightly more muted.
In any event, Cooke and Batula mostly weathered early cheating scandals and their spectacularly mismatched personalities to become the show’s most reliable couple. But the viciously snarky dissolution of their partnership, now playing out in excruciating detail in hourly increments every Tuesday night, seems to me to get at a universal truth. Not to sound “trad,” but these days, it is very difficult for my millennial peers to determine whether or not the relationship they’re in is the right one, because so many “conventional” tenets of adult life have deteriorated.
As a result, incompatible people stay together far longer than they should, lacking the nihilistic killer instinct required to kill something that’s already close to dead. You could practically hear the Batula-Cooke gears grinding, summer after summer: As long as we can hang out with our friends forever, why would we bother looking too closely at our problems?