Celeb splits — fans don’t want to hear
This week in the news there’s been road fatalities, a police shooting, the YouTube shooting in the US and a host of other awful stories.
The story that really got the people around me upset and riled up? Channing Tatum and his wife Jenna Dewan splitting up.
Every single entertainment news website and every social media timeline was flooded with a weird kind of mourning: “Love is dead”, “I’m too upset to function” and the even more grim “There’s no hope for us”.
We have an obsession with celebrity relationships and have given them a surprising amount of power. The right hook-up or break-up can make or break careers.
The entire Kardashian empire was essentially built on a sex tape, the Brad/Angelina/Jennifer love triangle was one of the most iconic celebrity stories of a generation and let’s not forget the cheating scandal that threatened to tear apart Jay-Z and Beyonce. I’ve figured it out though and I think the reason we care so much isn’t just because we’re star-obsessed fools, but because these people are role models, people we aspire to be like. Every time there’s a celebrity split, fans say the same thing: Love is dead, there’s no hope now. Even now, people are putting all their hopes into Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds.
Because that’s what it is: Hope. If we know anything, it’s that celebrities are supposed to have it all, right?
They have money, fame, popularity and beauty and these are the markers we’ve been taught should make us happy. And if people who have all those things still can’t make a marriage work then what hope do the rest of us have?
But here’s the problem I think a lot of people don’t understand: Being famous is (as far as I can tell) pretty hard. Actors’ schedules are tough enough for a marriage or family, but
It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how many autographs you sign, relationships are hard and sometimes they just don’t work out.
then there’s the constant demands of fame and being subject to tabloids and gossip. And on top of all that, they’re just people. They have the same problems we have; health, parenting, self-esteem, stress, pressure — the lot.
But more so, it doesn’t matter how much money you have or how many autographs you sign, relationships are hard and sometimes they just don’t work out.
When Channing and Jenna announced the split they said they’d “lovingly chosen to separate” but “absolutely nothing has changed about how much we love one another”, love was simply “a beautiful adventure that is taking us on different paths”.
Some more cynical folk are calling it a “new trend” in celebrity circles, an effort to seem above others by pretending everything is fine when it’s obviously not. But, I for one, commend it. I’ve known far too many people who have stayed in relationships they’re no longer invested in simply because they think they’re supposed to. Because they’ve got kids or bought a house with that person, because they run a business together, because they’ve been together for 10 years, because the other person hasn’t actually done anything wrong.
I think there’s something to be said for couples like Jenna and Channing being new kinds of role models for fans.
The kinds of role models who teach young people that if it’s not right for you, you don’t have to stay in a relationship no matter what pressures you think there are forcing you to do so. That you can have kids, your careers can be intertwined, your partner can be perfect, but you can still not want to be with that person and that’s okay.
Is it problematic to look up to celebrity couples simply because they’re beautiful and glamorous? Of course. Is it also problematic to cry over the break up of complete strangers? Probably.
But I imagine it’s similar to crying during a break up in a film; because you’ve watched this love story unfold on screen and rooted for them to make it.
Should we care as much as we do? Probably not. Is it a worry that people reacted more strongly to this than they did some of the other news this week? Yeah, probably. But can we really hold it against people when celebrity culture is one we’ve put on a pedestal? People just want happiness — celebrity or not.