Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Again? centers millennials and their Gen X parents, while also getting into something we don’t talk about enough in Black families: therapy.
The film picks up years later, and it was honestly weird—in a good way—to see the Black characters actually look aged. That’s really difficult to do in Hollywood. The main characters all had young children in the first film, and then in the second film Sheila, portrayed by the phenomenal Jill Scott, had just had a baby. Now we’re years later and all of these kids have grown up together almost like cousins.
And that’s really relatable.
When your parents are close with their friends, those friends have a hand in raising you. They’re the aunties and uncles. Their kids become your cousins. You grow up in each other’s houses, at each other’s birthday parties, weddings, cookouts and family events. So watching these kids grow up together actually felt like a realistic continuation of the first movies.
The film finds the crew attending what seems to be the first of the kids to get hitched. Angela and Marcus have two kids, Jasmine and Marcus Jr., and the plot revolves around them not really being open with their children about the realities of marriage.
Spoiler alert.
Jasmine and her beau get into a heated argument, which prompts—well, more so triggers—Sheila back to her relationship with Mike, who is also attending. Meanwhile, MJ, a millennial who used to be with Marcus Jr., represents another part of the younger generation trying to figure out relationships and what they actually want.
And this is where the generational part of the movie started getting interesting to me.
Terry and Diane’s kids are very close to the couple. Their son TJ, short for Terry Junior, is excited to be there, but it’s eventually revealed that even these kids have an unrealistic view of what “perfect” relationships look like.
And honestly, a lot of millennials can probably relate to that.
Most millennials complain, in theory, that the life their parents have is something unattainable—or it’s the polar opposite. Some people want the marriage, house, kids and stability their parents had. Other people don’t want to be close to their parents at all because of abuse, dysfunction or things that happened behind closed doors.
And then Roselyn enters the chat.
Portrayed by Taraji P. Henson, her son is marrying Jasmine, and she fronts the bill for this entire Italian wedding. It’s not really clear what her career is, but she’s clearly well known and she has the coin.
Her relationship with her son is frayed.
Her son doesn’t know that his father is a drug addict. She’s spent his entire life trying to mask that reality, presumably to protect him, but it resulted in him not really wanting anything to do with her. And despite this extraordinary wedding, all of the money and the beautiful views, what he really wants is his dad there.
That’s actually one of the things I found interesting about the movie.
You can spend all this money creating the perfect environment for your child, but you can’t necessarily manufacture the emotional reality they actually want.
There are these small moments of reality throughout the movie, mixed in with a lot of predictable moments—especially if you’re a real-life millennial dealing with your real, living, aging parents.
Because we’re at that age now.
We’re watching our parents get older while simultaneously realizing that they were figuring shit out too.
A lot of us grew up believing our parents knew what they were doing. Then you become an adult and start realizing, wait a minute… y’all were just making decisions too.
And that’s where the therapy component becomes interesting.
These parents didn’t necessarily have the language that millennials have around trauma, boundaries, emotional intelligence and mental health. Some of them dealt with problems by keeping quiet, protecting the children from the truth, staying married, presenting a united front or simply refusing to talk about it.
But the children grew up watching all of that.
So now you have a generation of millennials asking questions their parents may not have been prepared to answer.
Why did you stay?
Why didn’t you tell me?
Why did you make everything look perfect when it wasn’t?
What exactly am I supposed to believe about marriage after watching yours?
And that’s what makes Why Did I Get Married Again? more interesting than just another Tyler Perry relationship drama.
The kids aren’t just growing up.
They’re growing old enough to see their parents as actual people.
Not just Mom and Dad.
Not just Angela and Marcus.
Not just Sheila.
People with mistakes, secrets, trauma, relationships that didn’t work, relationships they stayed in and things they never figured out.
And I think that’s a very real part of the millennial experience—realizing that your parents’ generation had their own survival mechanisms, and now we’re trying to figure out which ones we’re keeping and which ones we’re breaking.
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