It’s been quite some time since Third Eye Blind first gave us a glimpse of their semi-charmed life, yet according to a resurfaced Reddit thread from 2012, the ripples of the 1990s rock band’s glory days remain. If you’re to believe the redditors, Third Eye Blind has wrecked relationships all across the country, and it’s not just because couples still can’t agree on what Stephan Jenkins is saying. No, it’s a lot sexier than that.
It all started a decade ago, when the original poster took to Reddit to say, “I think my wife cheated on me but I have no proof.” The poster spun a tale of marital confusion. It started out with a chain of events that began with concert tickets for Third Eye Blind and led down a scandalous path to betrayal and a broken heart. “Married less than a year, both in our mid 20s,” the poster wrote. “She gets concert tickets for Christmas, naturally I assume I’m going with her. Nope. She wants to take someone from work because he is supposedly a huge fan of the band. She also tells me he’s gay. I am upset, but I decide not to start a fight about it.”
The poster goes on to say that his wife and her friend were waiting near the band’s bus after the show ended, when the bassist approached her and invited her to their New Year’s Eve show the next day, promising to comp her tickets. She ended up accepting the offer, with her coworker friend again tagging along. “She texts me on the long drive there,” the poster continued. “Then when she gets the tickets, then nothing.” He didn’t hear from her until the next day. Not until “she is waiting at the subway station to go back to HER hotel. She eventually gets home around 4:30 p.m.”
The poster wanted to know why it took his wife so long to get back to her hotel room, but the implications were obvious. “She says they partied all night, she took prescription drugs and drank a lot,” the poster explained, before adding that his wife claimed to have amnesia from the hangover but admitted that she must have slept in the band suite. “Fast forward a day or so. She gets out of the shower, I notice she shaved her pubes. I ask her when she did it, she says friday. Here’s the thing. My wife NEVER shaves her pubes,” the hurt and confused husband lamented.
Finally, he ended his original post with what can only be considered Reddit catnip: “So what do you think? Is she cheating? With the bassist, or the guy from work? Should I confront her about it?”
Almost as soon as it went up, the post inspired a deluge of comments and questions, followed by updates from the original poster. What kept the story cooking over a roaring flame was that by this point, more details of his wife’s story had come out. For instance, one day, he realized his wife was still signed in on his computer. “She used her account for gonewild, which I knew about and supported, but what I didn’t expect is that she was sending photos to guys via PM,” he confided in a follow-up post. “I continued reading. One guy asked, ‘What’s the wildest thing you’ve ever done?’ And there it was. She responded with, ‘On NYE, I had my first threesome with a member of a famous 90s rock band and a friend…’”
“The first thing I did was speak to a lawyer about my options,” he continued. “Then I confronted her about it, and she said it was only half true. She said she embellished and that her friend really is gay, and she and the bassist made out and did oral. That’s when I left the apartment and headed straight for the hospital to get tested for STDs.”
When he got home, several hours later, his wife admitted that it wasn’t just oral — they’d had penetrative sex, too. He signed off with some of the saddest words ever posted online: “TL;DR — Reddit, you were right.”
All of which brings us back to this week. The thread received renewed attention after it was reposted on Best of Redditor Updates. This is also when the world learned that the original poster’s experience, however tragic, isn’t unique:
In fact, according to numerous other redditors, many more relationships have faced the lusty wrath of the Third Eye Blind tour bus.
One even recalled how his fellow service member in the military, whose wife supposedly cheated on him with Jenkins, went into a rage when he realized he couldn’t escape the sound of Jenkins’ voice, even after being stationed in Iraq.
But Reddit’s not the only place where rockin’ tales of infidelity with members of Third Eye Blind have spread. In 2020, Eve 6 frontman Max Collins took a stroll down memory lane and recalled how Jenkins put his heart in a blender, too.
It may warm your heart to know, though, that at least things worked out okay for the original poster. He’s currently seeing someone else, and he’s doing fine — even if “Jumper” probably won’t top his karaoke list any time soon. “Will it last? Don’t know, don’t care,” he wrote recently. “Living in the moment has been one of my coping mechanisms this year, so long as I live responsibly. When I’m with her, I’m happy, and that’s all I care about.”
Now, that’s a semi-charmed life.
Zaron Burnett III
Zaron Burnett is an investigative journalist and longform features writer based in Los Angeles. He covers culture, politics, race, and other perplexing mysteries for MEL.
