While most of the women on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives are, well, wives, Layla Taylor is forging her own path by embracing the single life post-divorce.
As the youngest cast member on season 1 of the hit Hulu series, Layla, 23, first caught viewers attention when she revealed that she had never experienced an orgasm. She later threw an endearing divorce party for herself and her friends, but the demise of her three-year marriage to ex-husband Clayton Wessel has yet to be fully explored on the show.
In Us Weekly’s latest cover story, the reality star confesses that pregnancy is what caused her and Clayton to rush into tying the knot just one year after they started dating — despite the duo having an “extremely toxic” relationship.
“I felt like we owed it to our unborn baby to give our family a chance [but] just don’t think we ever had a stable relationship built at all,” she explained. “And then adding kids on top of that, it just kind of kept getting more and more toxic and we fought more than we ever were happy with each other. Iit was just really bad.”
Eventually, Clayton threatened divorce one too many times , and Layla agreed to end things. “It was kind of a scare tactic to get me to fall back in line” she says. “He ended up being the one to call it off, but I didn’t go back.”
Despite going their separate ways, the exes are still coparents to their two sons, Oliver and Maxwell, and tensions have only risen post-split when it comes to raising their children together.
“Hopefully we can get to a more peaceful place,” she tells Us. “I think with him, there comes jealousy, and he found out about my boyfriend. So hopefully one day I’m praying that we can get to a point that we’re a lot more cordial.”
Could part of their rift be credited to showing parts of her life — like her divorce party — on camera? Layla says the duo haven’t even “‘talked” about the soiree, but believes that Clayton might be leaving her “hate comments” via social media.
“I don’t know for sure if it was him, but it was a spam account that said user and then a bunch of random numbers. And then if I clicked on the profile, it said ‘from your contacts.’ Then one of my best friends actually clicked on the profile too, and it also said from her contacts. The only person that we have in common is Clayton.”
She continued, “I think that he maybe is having a little bit of a hard time, but I wasn’t going into this being like, ‘OK, I’m going to make fun of our marriage and have a divorce party. I’m going to make fun of Clayton and talk about the fact that I’ve never had an orgasm.’”
Jealousy from her ex or not, Layla is embracing this new chapter of her life and has even found love with a new boyfriend, who is also Mormon. The twosome started dating after she slid into his Instagram DMs, and although she tells Us that an orgasm still “hasn’t happened yet,” the couple are “working on it.”
If The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives gets renewed for a second season, Layla says she’s hopeful that her new man will make an appearance. She also hopes she’ll be able to provide an “update” for viewers “with positive news” about her sex life.
For now, the couple are taking it “day by day,” which isn’t exactly common for the Mormon community. At 23, Layla says many people in Utah look at her like she “should probably be married already.” The fact she shares two children with an ex-husband, she tells Us, gives her the label of “damaged goods.”
While the judgment has been “hard for sure,” she’s standing in her truth of what’s right for her and her children. “I’m just a lot more picky this time around now,” she explains. “I’m not just dating for me anymore. Whoever I date and potentially end up with, it’s, like, that’s going to be my kids’ stepdad. So I’m very, very picky about who I am sharing my time with at the moment.”
That doesn’t mean she’s against walking down the aisle again eventually.
“I definitely see myself getting married again, but I do feel like I need to date around, I really need to discover who I am. I’m only 23. I’m very, very young,” she says. “ And that’s very common in church and our culture to be married already by this age, but I really don’t want to do that this time. I want to do it the right way. So if that means I have 10 more boyfriends by the time I get married again, then so be it.”
As for showing a perhaps unconventional way of Mormon life on TV, Layla says that she and her other #MomTok castmates “agree” on wanting to make women feel “empowered” and “inspired” to pursue dreams and careers outside of motherhood.
“I think it’s so important when you’re a mom and it’s taking up all of your time and your energy to just make sure that you have hobbies and different things outside of that too that make you happy,” she tells Us. “I think it’s just super important to just not get lost in motherhood and get lost in the mundane day-to-day life of being a mom. That’s one of the things that we wanted to inspire women to do — is just find something that makes them happy outside of that.”
For more on Layla’s life and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, watch the video above and check out the latest issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now.
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is now streaming on Hulu.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi