‘Summer House’’s Kyle Cooke and Amanda Batula Are the Doomed Reality-TV Couple We Can’t Turn Away From
Kyle Cooke and Amanda Batula, the ill-matched Summer House stars, announced their deeply inevitable separation last month.
For anyone who’s paid attention to the pair’s ten-season run on the Bravo series, this development was about as shocking as getting sand in your swim trunks. The dynamic between boisterous, highly emotional Kyle and laconic, sarcastic Amanda has long crackled with the visceral tang of deep dislike. These two contemporaries may have enduring love for one another, but they couldn’t be less compatible.
Batula, 34, is a sensitive, laconic girls’ girl and a longtime close friend of glamorous podcaster Paige DeSorbo, who checked out of the show at the end of season 9. Batula hails from New Jersey and recently launched a capsule swimwear collection for women with large breasts. Cooke, 43, is a consummate party-boy beverage entrepreneur with a side hustle as a college-campus DJ that has irritated Batula to no end.
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“I wanted him to stop going out late and partying, and he found a career where he goes out late and parties,” Batula told fellow Summer House cast member Ciara Miller in another recent episode.
Cooke is similarly sick of his partner. “The last two years, she smokes weed every night. My apartment smells like a frat house,” he intoned to his extremely fratty Summer House bros on a night out at a Hamptons social club. “It looks like a frat house, ‘cause she’s chaotically living.”
Onscreen, Amanda told Miller that fans of the show have so loudly clamored for her to divorce Cooke for so many years that she’d begun to have trouble distinguishing her own thoughts from the conclusions drawn by the collective consciousness of the internet.
The entire trajectory of this long day’s journey into night has been captured on reality TV. Amanda and Kyle made their relationship official in the season one finale. In season 3, rapidly-spreading rumors prompted Cooke to reveal to Batula that he’d cheated on her during a boys’ trip. Later that summer, they got engaged anyway.
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