The utter vacuity of celebrity couples renewing their vows
Guy who? Exactly. Guy Oseary is a Hollywood Mr Big, the manager and agent behind a galaxy of stars. unknown to millions, his is the name on no one’s lips outside a small circle of A-list talent. until this week, when he and his wife renewed their vows under the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro.
As an illustration of ostentation, of his power and reach, it was an incomparable triumph.
A highly-plumaged muster of clients and friends including Bono, P. Diddy, Matthew McConaughey, Dakota Johnson and Sacha Baron Cohen had trekked all the way to Brazil to join the celebrations. Even Madonna had to put on a hat to watch Oseary renew his wedding vows under a chuppah.
A Jewish Kabbalah ceremony held under the shadow of perhaps the most famous Christian statue in the world? Nobody minded the anomaly, if anyone even noticed.
After all, the relatively new concept of vow renewing has no basis in religion, no legal significance and no traditional liturgy or rituals of its own. Essentially meaningless and frivolous, you just make it up as you go along.
Do you double-take this personage you have been hitched to for a decade or so in return for a nice party, some new household gifts and the upgrading of your crockery cupboard? I do, I do, I do! Oseary actually married Brazilian model Michelle Alves in 2006. They have four children together and what appears to be a stable, loving relationship. So why bother with all this malarkey? Status, of course. Vow-renewing is not really about love, but prestige and appearance.
On a scale such as this, it’s also about impressing your friends and establishing superiority — dazzling one-upmanship complete with canapes, strewn rose petals and u2 playing at the reception. It is about private pledges significantly cheapened by the desire to make them public.
BUT mostly it is about couples out coupling other couples. look at us! look what we have together! We are so much better than you. We have endured.
One wonders how multi divorced attendees such as Madonna and actress Demi Moore must have felt, watching loved-up Guy and Michelle wallowing in the syrup of their romance.
A little bit broken inside, I would imagine.
Pity poor Demi, whose exhusband Ashton Kutcher played a vital part in the proceedings: a double blow to her ego.
Perhaps she took comfort in the fact that even while vow-renewals are on the rise — in celebrity land and on Civvy Street — they remain a fabricated piece of chichi nonsense.
Vow-renewals don’t require an officiant, a binding document or a rubber stamp. They might be fun for the couple involved, but they are morally weightless, an empty bit of revelry masquerading as a significant event. Something that has cachet on Instagram, but nowhere else.
I can see why celebrity couples are tempted. Prolonging the story arc of a marketable marriage is clearly good for business.
Sir Rod Stewart and his third wife Penny lancaster renewed their wedding vows over the summer — ‘sharing’ the celebration with Hello! magazine.
Vow-renewals are tacky events that glamour model Katie Price or participants on TV reality shows such as Real Housewives Of Orange County are always doing.
THEN ordinary folks see glamour in all this, and they start doing it, too. Destination weddings are bad enough, must we now prepare ourselves for destination wedding vow-renewals?
Those kidults Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon renewed their vows five times — at Disneyland, in the Maldives, in las Vegas, at the top of the Eiffel Tower and once in hospital — before ending their marriage. yes, those renewals really did have spiritual depth, didn’t they? The Beckhams renewed their vows last year, a totally private event at home, with only six guests. And yet somehow we all know about it — isn’t that strange? Perhaps because David revealed all in a radio interview.
‘We stay together because we love each other and we have four children,’ he said. That was a few months before his name was linked with party-girl lady Mary Charteris, since when Posh has been looking even more miserable than usual.
Perhaps vow-renewal is nothing more than emotional scaffolding for some couples. underneath the flamboyance and the narcissism, perhaps they are doing it to convince themselves, not others, of the strength of the relationship.
OK. But whatever the reason and no matter how big the celebration, please don’t invite me.