If the news of Kandi Burruss and Todd Tucker divorcing wasn’t already sad enough, it looks like things between the two could take a complicated turn.
Per Us Weekly, while we were all getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner last Wednesday, Tucker was responding to Burruss’s divorce petition, and requested primary custody of their two children, Ace and Blaze. In addition, he questioned their prenuptial agreement, which his legal team says he was pressured into signing right before they married in April of 2014.
Regarding the petition surrounding their children, Tucker noted that they are with him in Georgia while Burruss is out of state working (that includes her latest Broadway stint in NYC, starring in Juliet, from December to March) and that work “will continue to require her to be away from the children for at least the next several months.”
As for the prenuptial agreement, which was a hot topic of discussion during the star’s days on Bravo, his team says the agreement was issued without Tucker’s lawyer present. “Despite that knowledge, [Burruss’] counsel presented the final agreement to [Tucker] for signature immediately before the wedding ceremony, without any notice to or consultation with [Tucker’s team], who had been significantly engaged in the negotiation process. These circumstances raise substantial questions concerning the enforceability of said document.” Nevertheless, [Tucker] remains committed to working in good faith to resolve this matter amicably and privately to the extent possible.”
Part of his counterclaim in the divorce is for a division of all marital assets in their 11 years of marriage, “both real and personal, tangible and intangible, between the parties.”
It could get ugly. But it’s already kind of ugly on social media, just not between the estranged spouses.
In the short time since Burruss filed, there has been a mixed bag of feelings about the couple’s breakup. Most people were caught off guard by the news. Saddened. Others, though, have been pulling together videos from over the years of conversations between Burruss, Tucker, sometimes including her friends/glam team members, to point to possible signs that things were bound to get tricky at home.
“I used to date somebody back in the day, and that muf–ka catered like I was a billionaire, but it was just something that they enjoyed doing for me,” Tucker said in one video, when speaking on the topic with his wife and her friends on what it takes for women to cater to men.
“She worked like anybody else, she had a child, but she would cook, she would cook in her panties,” he added, as though trying to send a message.
And yet, as Burruss noted, her efforts were in vain: “Ok, so, why didn’t y’all stay together? I’m just saying!”
Another example was his strong feelings about a woman on Burruss’s team being gifted an expensive piece of jewelry by a man she considered a friend, whom she had not been intimate with.
“That’s stupid as f–k,” he replied. “He’s your friend, you don’t deserve a tennis bracelet. What have you done for a tennis bracelet?”
Speaking of showing appreciation and interest in a man, in another clip, he noted behaviors that were indicative of top-tier treatment, and what’s not:
“We chillin, you don’t pour a ni–a no drink, you don’t offer no meal, no sandwich…”
In the clips surfacing, specificially on TikTok, Tucker shares viewpoints regarding how women should show up for men. His belief is that just as some women see themselves as the prize, hell, he sees himself the same way. If her single friends wanted to be taken seriously, they needed to cater to prospective male partners. It didn’t matter what they had going on.
It all sounded like light banter on camera, but he was serious. So how does that mindset work within a marriage? Especially if you’re the very successful, very ambitious and very wealthy wife of a man who thinks like this?
None of this is to demonize Tucker, for the record. But I do think that after watching him on Real Housewives of Atlanta for years being called out by Mama Joyce, the Old Lady Gang, and others close to the star, my sympathy for him may have clouded my ability to see that there were some flags flying. Like his disappointment over the fact that Burruss was constantly booked and busy once they started a family, including getting into acting, while his own career was sidelined, he stated, because of her. (For the record, they became successful business partners, producing big projects and opening restaurants together.) This was made clear when they were in a marriage therapy session featured on RHOA a few years ago, and he shared his frustration that a role working on The Chi in Chicago, coupled with consistent events she would attend and the many other things she does that have made her the brand she is, took her away from home too much.
“When you come back, you book every hour that you have. It just doesn’t make sense,” he remarked. “At a certain point, you have to be like, ‘I need my time with my family.’ You’re doing the acting thing, on top of all the other s–t. So it’s like, let some of that s–t go, spend some time with your family, and then take your a– back out to Chicago to finish doing your acting thing.”
She replied, eventually tearful over his feelings: “I guess I’m just trying to make everything work.”
He continued, and the focus shifted from the family to him. “I sacrificed a lot to support your dreams. When I came into this situation with you, I wasn’t good enough. It was like, I gotta speedball fast enough to make a lot of money so that I can be good enough — good enough not only to your mama, but to the f–king world. It was a lot of pressure.
“I figured it out to make everybody else happy,” he added. “I don’t do the s–t that I like to do, like production and TV and film. That’s s–t that I was doing before. I haven’t really done that s–t. I didn’t take jobs because jobs didn’t pay me what I make now. I was able to become a business entity that makes a lot of money. Everybody accepts the money guy. He’s good, he’s the best, he’s this. But I’m not happy.”
This sort of dynamic has become a common revelation in recent celebrity splits. When Teyana Taylor quietly divorced Iman Shumpert in 2023, it was made public, to her dismay, that she found him to be “jealous” and insecure about her fame. Despite him making more when they met while he was playing in the NBA, by 2020, that career path came to an end while her stardom, and income, increased significantly. From alleged moments of irritation over being asked to step aside by photographers on the red carpet so she could have solo shots, to Taylor choosing to “intentionally dim her light for her husband to try to have a harmonious and peaceful marriage,” things took a turn when he decided he wanted a traditional wife. Case in point, Taylor said she passed on different gigs and recording opportunities because she claimed her ex-husband “did not want her to work.”
And in Cardi B’s divorce from Offset, which is currently stalled because he wants spousal support, for her to pay his taxes and give him certain property, she believed he was trying to compete with her professionally. “I couldn’t even enjoy my own wins because I felt like he was going through something,” she told fans on Twitter Spaces. “And this is the realest sh-t somebody could ever do for you. I used to pray for this person before I prayed for myself. And then this motherf–ker had the nerve to say that I was being ‘competitive.’”
“I’m like, ‘Wait, tell me how was I being competitive?’ And motherf–ker said, ‘When you posted my album, you said ‘I’m next.’ And I’m like, I wasn’t even trying to be competitive—that didn’t even cross my mind. So that means that a motherf–ker was competing with me.
“Can you believe that?” she added, accusing him of being jealous. “Can you believe that I had the enemy in my bed all along?”
And of course, women being made to feel as though they don’t respect their spouses and aren’t submissive enough, success be damned, is a common occurrence in everyday marriages. That’s why women’s degrees, businesses and career advancements can be minimized by complaints like, “Women don’t cook anymore,” we don’t know how to let a man be a man, and we don’t know how to…wait for it…cater.
Despite what you accomplish, you can always feel like you’re being tugged, like you’re letting someone down in your life, when you’re treated like that’s the case. And that’s not to say that is what ultimately led to the end of Tucker and Burruss, but such is the complex nature of an untraditional man, wanting a traditional wife in this day and age. To want to be the one making decisions, standing in the limelight, or being served by a woman who, outside of the home, is leading and making all the decisions. When that’s not happening, discontent is bound to take hold. And despite wanting traditional behaviors, you can end up with a guy who reminds you they’re not so traditional-minded after all, because they want to walk away with something if it all ends (like half).
None of this is to say there’s anything wrong or unnatural with a successful woman finding actual fulfillment in tending to her partner, centering her children, or taking pride in the home she’s creating. But the cultural pressure to choose, or better yet to prove what’s most important to you on a daily basis, career or family, ambition or devotion, still lingers. Balance doesn’t exist, and the burden often falls on women, who end up putting themselves last, to minimize their aspirations, or fear that independence might cost them companionship.
But the truth is, you can’t begin a relationship with a person who has proven themselves to be a go-getter, to have big dreams, to have passions, only to get with them and start pointing out the ways in which those things run counter to their ability to be a good partner to you. If the only way one can feel valued and appreciated is if it’s proven that they’re being served and uplifted by their partner, but they don’t value proving the same with similar intensity, what’s the point of partnership? Do you want a whole partner? Or do you just want to be in control?