Who The F*** Did She Marry? & the Love of Ten-Minute TikTok Videos

 It’s 2:41 am. How did I get here? What’s going on? I'm disillusioned, delirious, sweaty, yet cold? I can’t look away from my phone…but I barely keep my eyes open as I listen with complete military attention to ReesaTeesa telling part thirty-seven of her infamous “Who Tf Did I Marry?” TikTok series. Reesa’s story is captivating: it’s raw and vulnerable, the way this woman can articulate a story – I’m beyond obsessed with her ability to remember each niche detail. The confidence in her voice crafts a genuineness to her words, a feeling that immediately led me to take her side and wonder who in the hell did ReesaTeesa marry? 

For those unfamiliar with this “ReesaTeesa” I’m talking about, you are in for a jaw-dropping journey. ReesaTeesa, whose real name is Tareasa Johnson, on February 14, 2024, began posting her now fifty-part TikTok series titled “Who TF Did I Marry?” describing her life dating and marrying a pathological liar. While she didn’t process the countless red flags during their marriage (to which she calls out on her blindness to those stop-and-question moments), she utilizes her story to warn others, projecting a message to trust your intuition whenever faced with sketchy situations and hopes to raise awareness for others if their experiences feel eerily similar. With over 3.7 million TikTok followers, viewers listen as she describes in grave detail her love-life timeline with her now ex-husband, whom she calls “Legion,” the nickname during their relationship. In shocking nature, she tells the almost unthinkable lies in chronological order from the time she met Legion until the divorce, lies that filled her life with immense stress. The majority of these lies she didn’t learn about until post-divorce when she essentially became her own CIA agent–putting the puzzle pieces together from discussions with his relatives, federal documents, many phone calls, and simply enough time to reflect upon each event and connect the dots. Heads up, spoilers are ahead--I would strongly recommend indulging in the twists and turns of her TikTok series for yourself, but here is a brief synopsis for now. 

She tells audiences in podcast-like videos what Legion lied about. That type of video where you watch Reesa on your phone, yet it feels like it's the two of you on a FaceTime call–it’s very casual how she talks about each event. There is an ease to understanding the storyline from how lowkey it felt, adding a dimension of comfortability with listening to what she was saying. The Legion's lies were limited (and not restrained to!), his criminal past, his past love life, his job, his income levels, his family tree, his commitment to Reesa, buying her a car and a house in Atlanta, even about thirty-minute phone calls in the morning with supposed brothers and sisters. The brother himself revealed that “Legion” never called him–the man was talking to nobody for hours and hours on end, putting “relatives” on speakerphone to avoid any suspicion over the truth of who he was talking to. With the absolute absurdity of consistent lies, you can’t help but feel sorry for her and wonder how manipulative each aspect of life would’ve been. The timeline lasted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and ended in the early era of easing restrictive laws. Reesa describes the pandemic as an accelerator of her relationship–he wanted to get married in quarantine to make things easier while living together, and she didn’t have any hesitancy to his request. 

What was so surprising about the series wasn’t just the content of what she endured or the sheer amount of lies that became normalized, but the length of each video and her ability to hold an audience’s attention for long periods of time. Whether it’s set in her car on the way to work, in her home, or a parking lot, she explains her story without any editing and speaks as if you’ve been friends for years. Each video of the series was around ten minutes long, that’s right, each video typically utilized the maximum amount of time the app allows for recording thanks to the new and improved feature TikTok began offering around February of 2022. When the app first gained popularity, its max limit for filming was only fifteen seconds long, a tribute to the new wave of short-form media consumption that quickly became the norm. From a previous maximum time limit of one minute, then three minutes, to now ten, creators can create longer-form entertainment on the platform. TikTok realized there was a benefit in making longer-form content on its app accessible. The strategy around the ten-minute video was one intended to expand their audience to older folks, who typically have a tolerance to longer videos or podcast-like content (Birney). It was a new demographic to appeal to with the change in time limits and saw immediate success. 

Users have taken this new opportunity of extended time limit to create content like a mini-Youtube. Whether through “Get Ready With Me” videos, cooking videos, or recently with Reesa’s series, these vlog-like videos have gained popularity and traction within the TikTok community. It’s a nostalgic homage to the platform that controls so much of our media consumption from a young age, YouTube. Yet TikTok directly replicated its long-form content structure for success on its platform, a copy-and-paste method that social media platforms are stealing ideas and making aspects their own. I remember watching my first longer video when this feature got added, witnessing a portion of an entire movie or TV series showing up on my “for you page,” which initially threw me off. But slowly, I gravitated toward them and found myself watching entire episodes of shows or parts of movies on TikTok. There’s some underlying pull behind these ten-minute videos, even though it was an app designed to be the revitalized Vine of current times. Like with shows or movies not easily accessible on Netflix or HBO Max, watching a forty-part series of an episode became an outlet for consumption. The switch was confusing at first, but over time, the adjustment to long-form content compared to snapshots of videos has driven a new obsession with the app and provided space for creators like ReesaTeesa to thrive. 

There’s been a cultural shift in acceptance that this app can be a place for long-form content, especially from news channels or political groups. The introduction of the ten-minute video has been utilized by media outlets such as The Daily Mail (UK), The Dodo, NowThisPolitics, National Geographic, and other sources that generate current news for viewers on TikTok (Montorfani). TikTok has grown to be its news outlet, being the most downloaded app in the world, it’s a hotspot for sharing news or current events to a large audience quickly. From local to nationwide events, the chance to share what is happening through ten-minute videos has become a new tactic for these news outlets. In a recent publication from the Columbia Journalism Review, Cameron Joseph, a freelance political reporter, describes how “roughly one-third of Americans aged 18–29 regularly get their news from TikTok” and that “nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter” showing the cultural importance of using social media as a news outlet for youth (Joseph). Generation Z has grown to value social media as its branch of the news tree, something reporters have latched onto and begun generating short and long content about current events to keep the masses updated. 

As for the future of these ten-minute videos? I don’t see them losing popularity anytime soon, but rather an increase in demand. With the new rise in popularity for the “Who Tf Did I Marry?” series and ongoing use of the videos for movies, TV series, and political groups, I envision a change of TikTok labeled as a platform for short-term entertainment. In recent news, Tareasa Johnson has signed with talent agency CAA for representation, showing the world there are opportunities to gain stardom from these longer videos on TikTok (Vlessing). With the success of her series, multiple new series are beginning to come out about folks detailing their own experiences with lying partners--no shortage of content here! The hyper fixation and immediate indulgence from the curiosity of long-form content, coupled with a newly established audience on TikTok of these videos, I argue that longer-form entertainment is here to stay and will continue to take shape on the app.