Why Is Everyone on ‘The Ultimatum’ So Mean to Riah?

Every now and again, while watching a reality show, I’ll encounter a character whose aura completely baffles me. They seem nice, and they don’t seem to be trying to offend anyone in the group, and yet they’ll constantly find themselves on the receiving end of someone else’s nonsense. Take, for example, Jeriah (aka “Riah”) from Netflix’s The Ultimatum Season 2: All she tried to do was play the game. So why do a couple of her fellow cast members seem to resent her for it?

On The Ultimatum, five brave couples swap partners, in the hopes of figuring out whether or not they’re ready for marriage. Each person spends three weeks with a new “trial’ spouse before swapping back to their original partner for another few weeks. In the end, they all must decide whether to get engaged to their current partner, break up and leave the experience single, or maybe even exist the show with someone else.

As with most reality shows, this season features a couple of big personalities; some seem to enjoy stirring the pot, while others struggle to accept the terms of the game without getting jealous. Riah, a 25-year-old from South Carolina who received the ultimatum from her partner, Treyvon (aka “Trey”), is not one of these people. As far as we’ve seen in the season’s first eight episodes, at least, she’s perfectly sweet—at worst, she’s perhaps a little aloof or difficult to read. Yet for whatever reason, the rest of the cast feels comfortable speaking badly about or to Riah whenever they get the chance.

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Both Riah and Trey readily admit during their time on the show that their relationship needs work. While Trey is 29 and has everything together, Riah is still figuring things out, like her career, what she wants out of life—all those things that many women in their mid-twenties are still figuring out.

“I think right now I have a lot of ‘I don’t knows,’” Riah tells Trey at one point. “I need to figure out those ‘I don’t knows.’”

As far as Trey is concerned, he and Riah should be able to figure that out as a married couple. But some of her concerns are pretty serious: She wants to live in a city for a year, while Trey seems to have no interest in doing so. She’s not sure if she wants to have kids, and Trey can’t give her a straight answer as to whether or not he’d ultimately be OK with that.

Riah’s words can sometimes run counter to her actions. At one point, she tells Trey that she doesn’t expect him to take care of her financially, but later on she tells a fellow castmate that she expects her partner to cover their rent or mortgage while she covers utilities. While she clearly craves affection and big gestures in her relationships, Trey claims that she responded to a candle-and-rose-filled Valentine’s Day surprise by saying, “It’s not quite like the TikTok video.” (As Riah herself admits at one point, “I have a million walls.”)

Still, did Riah really deserve to be called “this fucking Hooters bitch” by her fellow castmate Lisa, just for talking to Lisa’s partner, Brian? During a cocktail party, when Lisa spots Riah talking to her partner, she breaks them up before storming into the parking lot. There, she tells Briah, “This bitch ain’t got nothing to offer,” before adding that Riah is a “dense-ass female” who is “probably easy and can give you some ass.”

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Speaking with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed about that moment, Lisa said, “I wish I would have handled the situation at the cocktail party a lot differently, because I didn’t want that to be like the premise of our relationship.”

But the indignities don’t stop there. During his own conversation with Lisa, Trey says that he feels like he has more in common with some of his castmates than with Riah. “A lot of times, if I’m talking with her, we’re talking about make-up and hair,” he says, adding, “We don’t have a lot in common, so whenever we talk, getting on the same page has been difficult.”

Riah never brings up hair or make-up during her time on air during The Ultimatum. She does, however, mention how neglected she feels in her relationship, insisting that Trey seems to focus only on himself and his work. She also reveals that two years ago, she had a miscarriage—which would seem like reason enough for needing some time to figure things out.

Nevertheless, the criticisms persist. Another castmate who seems to think he’s got Riah all figured out is her trial husband, James, who tells Trey that he believes Riah is not ready for marriage based on only a few awkward days with her.

Of all the trial marriages on The Ultimatum this season, Riah and James’s might be the strangest. Riah seemed ready to pick Brian before he and Lisa flew the coop early; afterward, she landed with James, whose partner Ryann also chose to enter into a trial marriage with Trey. At first, James and Riah seem to bond; they both grew up with single mothers and feel they missed out on growing up with positive relationship role models. During a tipsy card game, James tells Riah about his idea of foreplay: building romantic tension throughout the day, through gestures both emotional and physical.

Then, something switches. As James grows increasingly concerned about his relationship with Ryann (perhaps threatened by her growing bond with Trey), he becomes more closed-off around Riah. In Episode 4, she calls him out on it, asking why James has suddenly become less physically affectionate. Riah challenges him to hold her hand or give her a hug. Rather than explain himself directly, however, James simply says, “I think it’s just a time and a place.” He then proceeds to make their disconnect all about Riah.

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In that moment, James seems to mean that the appropriate time and place for intimacy is with Ryann, his partner of seven years. Riah insists that they’re in a trial marriage to learn what it would be like to marry someone else; for her, physical touch, like holding hands and hugging, is part of that. James keeps insinuating that Riah is trying to “get physical,” even as she says, “not physical, physical.”

At times, James’s remarks can border on cruel. “I’ll be honest,” he says to Riah at one point. “I don’t think married couples only hold hands. I don’t think married couples only give each other the occasional hug… If that’s physical for you, we might as well go back to middle school.”

During their conversation, James suggests that Riah is acting out because she’s worried that Trey doesn’t care about what she’s doing. At another point, he says, “I feel like you’re ready to get out of the relationship with Trey so bad that you would be fine starting a new relationship tomorrow.” Riah counters that she does love Trey, “but we’re going through this experience to be with another person.”

James’s response? “I don’t have to fuck someone to find out what it would be like to live with them.”

“Not saying we’re fucking…” Riah says back, with a palpable look of exhaustion on her face.

Perhaps the most confusing moment from this season arrives at a group gathering during Episode 5, where James tells Trey that Riah said she was “open” to having sex with him. Trey simply replies, “Riah FaceTimed me. She’s upset, crying, she’s like, ‘I think James wants me to have sex with him.’ So now I have questions.” No one seems to clarify these opposing narratives, so the question of what, precisely, went down between Riah and James remains a bit of a mystery.

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Later on, however, James tells Trey that he believes Riah “sounds like she is not in a position to get married right now. I feel like y’all are at very different points in your lives. You’re in a great position—financially, career-wise. Don’t stray outside of what you want.”

As is often the case in reality television, we clearly don’t have all the information here; maybe Riah’s fellow castmates saw something we didn’t. From what’s aired, however, it’s hard to understand what about her is so offensive. Maybe next week’s finale and reunion episode, which drop Aug. 30, will clarify a few things—or maybe everyone in Riah’s orbit just needs to lighten up.

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