From Wet Leg to Taylor Swift – what’s the appeal of airing our dirty laundry?

Of all the things to write truthfully about, relationships are arguably the most difficult. It’s not because the subject matter is particularly complex. Or because it requires an esoteric grasp of the English language. It isn’t and doesn’t.

No. Put simply, it’s because there are two sides to every story. But when one of those sides is a writer, the number of perspectives doubles. Sometimes it even triples.

This often happens after a big break-up. I’m talking colossal, earth-shattering paragraphs of vitriol on WhatsApp kind of break-ups. Sure, each person involved will have their own version of events. But the writer will inevitably have several. The version they offer up to friends and family that presents them in the best possible light. The one they keep to themselves that doesn’t. And then there’s the version they turn into art.

That third category has been a bone of contention in the last week, as two articles about relationships went viral on social media. First up was an offering from writer and Celebrity Big Brother star Liz Jones, who, for reasons no one is entirely sure of, decided to reunite with her ex-husband Nirpal Dhaliwal after 15 years to see if they still had a spark. Suffice to say, they did not.

In the article, Jones revisits various issues in her marriage, calling Dhaliwal “lazy” and accusing him of draining both her energy and her bank account. On their wedding night, she claims, he disappeared after the starter and she didn’t see him until the following morning. The reunion was, to put it bluntly, a total disaster. The quotes Jones includes from her ex-husband are astonishing to read, full of venom and misogyny: “Who gives a f***, you’re a f***ing s*** writer,” he says over lunch, later telling her to “shut up”.

Both Jones and Dhaliwal have written about one another before, each lobbing various insults and accusations at the other in print at any given opportunity. The most famous example, perhaps, was when Jones wrote that she had stolen her ex-husband’s sperm from a used condom in an attempt to get pregnant. In this article, Dhaliwal claims that because he rarely climaxed with Jones, it could only have been one “that fell from [his] pocket after an encounter elsewhere”.

The piece made for grim reading for a variety of reasons. But it also highlighted the complexities of taking your relationship to the page. One person’s story will never match another’s, particularly not when it has been metabolised for public consumption. This was also the moral of the story in an interview with musician and former Wet Leg member Doug Richards in The Sunday Times titled, “My Wet Leg lover gave me the boot – and won’t stop kicking.”

In the piece, Richards, who went out with Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale, claims he was pushed out of the band, whose name he says he and his brother came up with, after their break-up. Because of this, he says, he is owed songwriting credits on at least two of the band’s tracks.

“I feel frightened to try and approach that subject,” he told the publication. “But I did write [on those songs] and they are on the record. So I probably should get recognised.” Some of the band’s biggest tracks, Richards says, including “Wet Dream” and “Piece of S***”, are also about him.

“I realise she wrote these lyrics during the heat of a break-up, but she could have come and told me about it after, given me a heads-up at least,” he says, going on to reference another lyric in “Ur Mum” that he claims is about his late mother. Wet Leg have not responded to any of these allegations.

The problem is not that these aren’t necessarily fair points; songwriters should obviously be credited for their work, and using someone’s dead mother against them in a song is hardly kind. It’s the optics of it all. Musicians have been writing scathing tracks about their exes for millennia. It’s kind of part of the deal. It’s the basis of Taylor Swift’s entire career.

But to speak up and say those songs are about you, and then try to claim ownership of some of them, is not a good look. This is particularly true when the musician in question has been hailed as one of the most exciting female talents in the industry – more than one comment piece has since included the line “behind every successful woman is a man wanting credit”.

It doesn’t help that there’s almost no acknowledgement of Teasdale’s talent – at least that which exists without Richards. The whole thing reeks of misogyny, as was pointed out by numerous women on Twitter.

Both articles show just how tricky it is to offer up a narrative of your relationship to the public, especially once it has dissolved. Whether it’s in an article or a song, no two people are going to tell the same story about what went wrong. That’s OK. That’s life. If these two pieces have taught us anything, it’s that the quicker you can accept that and move on – instead of trying to rewrite someone else’s narrative – the better.