The Gospel according to Marites: Is chismis about them, or about us?
Picture this: It’s 2020, the middle of lockdown, and the world is on mute. No dinners, no drinks, no office gossip at lunch break. Just you, your phone, and the infinite swipe. Out of nowhere, she shows up, eagerly tapping on your screen. “Mare, ano ang latest?” And just like that, Marites is in the room.
She’s not new. Gossip has always had a face, even if it didn’t always have a name. In English, the word once meant something quite different. Gossip comes from godsibb, an Old English word for “godparent,” a person bound by trust, affection, and kinship. Over the centuries, the meaning slipped, from intimacy to idle chatter, from trusted confidante to tattler-in-chief. The fall from grace of godsibb reminds us that gossip was never just a pastime but a person, constantly reinventing herself to suit the times.
Some say she first appeared in the small-town tambayan, where neighbors gathered at dusk to trade updates under the glow of a single street lamp. Others place her in the early ’80s, when landlines with long spiral cords stretched across kitchens, and family phones became hotlines of intrigue. By the ’90s, she was a staple at beauty parlors and panaderias, thriving on hairspray fumes and the smell of freshly baked pandesal. She was always there, but it was only in the early 2020s, when TikTok and Facebook turned boredom into an Olympic sport, that she was christened. A pandemic baby, born of memes, she went viral and never looked back.
The name gave her power. Suddenly, gossip had a brand. You didn’t have to say your neighbor was a chatterbox, or that your cousin was nosy, or that your officemate had nothing better to do. You just said “Marites,” and the whole country knew exactly what you meant. Overnight, she became the patron saint of coffee breaks, a shorthand for the grapevine, the whistle-blower, the busybody, the walking news feed.
Don’t underestimate her. Gossip has always been society’s first news outlet. Long before CNN or Twitter, stories traveled through whispers, murmurs, and knowing looks. Who got rich and who went broke, who left and who returned, who married and who eloped with the staff, who died? Gossip was a community lifeline. To be out of the loop was to be in the dark.
Anthropologists argue that gossip was as essential to survival as fire or shelter, because it taught people who could be trusted and who couldn’t. Marites didn’t just infiltrate society. She built it.
But the trouble with her is that she cannot resist embellishment. In her hands, facts become flexible. One child turns into three. A borrowed car becomes a stolen one. An overnight absence becomes a sordid affair. Marites thrives on the thrill of interpretation, and she doesn’t always pause to ask if the story she is passing along is true. In the process, she can ruin reputations, turn friends into enemies, and tear families apart. You can’t ignore her, not when she butters her croissant with the serenity of a nun, then murmurs that society’s dreamboat keeps a vanity stocked with silk chemises, or that its golden girl leaves the ball to lace up a pair of men’s brogues.
Marites is not just gossip. She is the mirror in which we catch our own reflection, flawed and fascinating.
She’s entertaining. Gossip is sparkle in a world that can feel like a spreadsheet. It’s the plot twist in the life of someone you thought you knew. It’s the drumroll before dessert, the confetti at the end of brunch, the spritz of perfume that lingers in the air long after the story is told. She makes you gasp, laugh, shake your head, clutch your pearls, or reach for your phone. In the right company, she’s delicious. She turns ordinary mortals into icons, and icons into mortals. Without her, brunch would be just eggs and orange juice.
But gossip is not only fun. It is a mirror. Every whisper is an autobiography, even when it pretends to be reportage. When we breathe that the neighbor can’t afford his new car, are we admiring or resenting? When we dissect an office breakup, are we sympathizing or celebrating? When we discuss a politician’s sex video, are we outraged or entertained? Gossip reveals our values, our fears, our desires, our hidden cruelty, our reluctant compassion. To watch Marites at work is to study anthropology in real time, messy but true, a people’s diary written sentence by sentence at every dining table.
And sometimes, she delivers justice. Not the kind with gavels and robes, but the kind that refuses to let wrongdoers escape the light. When crimes are committed behind locked doors, when powerful people silence their critics, gossip seeps through the cracks, first as whispers, then as roars. Many revolutions began as rumors no one wanted to believe until everyone had heard them. Marites may not sit on a bench, but she has dragged more than a few public figures into the court of opinion. She hands out verdicts at lightning speed, no appeal allowed. In this country, cases drag on for decades, but one viral video can convict in a day.
If you think she’s someone else, think again. She’s not an outsider. She is us. Every time we lean in with, “Did you hear,” we become her. Every time we forward an article we haven’t fact-checked, we are her. Every time we click on a headline that begins with “shocking,” we feed her. She is both the friend we side-eye and the enemy we secretly keep close because without her, we wouldn’t know half the things we think we know.
So what do we do with her? Shame her? Cancel her? Pretend we’ve never invited her to brunch? We could, but she would still show up. The better answer may be to indulge her in moderation. Gossip is like free-flowing mimosas at Wildflour or a box of polvoron smuggled into a diet lunch. A little keeps things lively. Too much turns toxic. The trick is to know when to laugh, when to listen, when to ask questions, and when to close the tab and move on.
Marites will never leave. She is in the group chat, in the comments thread, in the salon, in the boardroom, and in the brunch we’re already planning next weekend. Her pantry is never empty, because life never runs out of stories. She will stir your coffee and stir the pot, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. What she says about others will always reveal something about us.
Marites is not just gossip. She is the mirror in which we catch our own reflection, flawed and fascinating. It was in the pandemic that she was christened, when lockdowns kept us indoors, but our tongues wandered further. Marites sat in every chat room, stood in every pantry line, lurked in every Zoom square. She spread faster than the virus. To name her was to admit she was already in us, the godsibb we couldn’t quarantine.
The question is not whether we know her, but whether we can admit how much of her is already in us.
