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Celebrity Breakups of Long-time Marriages Can Really Make Us Sad. Why Do We Get So Invested in Their Relationships?
After 19 years together, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban were presumed to be totally solid, so news of their split landed like a tiny heartbreak in our feeds.
Hadn’t she been through enough with men? Who could forget how she managed to survive the Cruise circus? When, back in 2001 during a televised David Letterman interview, the host tactlessly asked how her divorce was going and she quipped, “Well, at least I can wear heels again?” and clapped back to ask how his divorce was going? Not to mention her openness and honesty in sharing how she suffered two miscarriages during her marriage, one as a newlywed and one just before filing for divorce in 2001. The way she handled such public heartbreak with total panache made us root for her, whatever was next.
As writer Anne Helen Peterson aptly wrote in her popular Substack Culture Study, Kidman’s marriage to Urban “felt like a gleeful comeuppance.” A successful country musician in his own right, she seemed to have found a partner who had his own thing to do so she could do hers—and her career soared. She had everything women in our generation were told we should strive for: the loving partner, the kids, and the epic career. But, as every woman in her 50s knows, even those we hold up as aspirational are ultimately human beings made of flesh and bone, and even the closest couples can grow apart over time. And, because Kidman’s life is put on blast, we couldn’t help but react as if it happened to one of our nearest and dearest. Here’s proof: That “heels” quip just went viral again because Urban is yet another short king.
Yeah, yeah—we know full well that celebrities are total strangers to us and what goes on behind closed doors in their marriages is none of our damn business, yet we feel genuinely bummed when things go awry in their relationships. So, when long-time celebrity couples call it quits, why do we get so personally invested in what went down?
Kidman Is our Parasocial Peer
Celebrity attachments, no matter how thin, are actually parasocial relationships—those “one-sided attachments we develop with people who don’t even know we exist.” As it turns out, science says we can’t help but feel some kind of connection to people around the same age we are, even if they’ve been in the spotlight our whole adult lives. Psychologists call this tendency the Social Comparison Theory, and when celebs weather life’s transitions, like getting married or having kids when we do, we can’t help but clock it.
“When the celebrity feels more relatable or aspirational to us, we tend to be more positive and protective of them,” explained Monica O’Neal, Psy. D., a Boston-based clinical psychologist. “We attribute positive qualities to them as a way to hold and highlight positive qualities in ourselves, with the compassion we might have a hard time finding for ourselves. We want them to succeed, and there’s a way we think their success is our success.”
On the flipside, if you’ve gone through or are experiencing a breakup that plays out similarly, watching what Kidman goes through divorce-wise might push some buttons. “It’s almost like a trauma reaction, in a way, for women who may have experienced something similar,” O’Neal observed. It can lead to this projection: If someone as talented, beautiful, and powerful as Kidman is struggling to have it all, how can we?
Humans Can’t Resist Gossip
No matter your age, it’s all too easy to tip into celebrity breakup rabbit holes, even if driven by harmless human-on-human curiosity. Who can resist gossiping, even if it feels harmless because it’s about strangers? Not us! According to a Brown University professor, as many as 65 percent of our chats are about other people.
Especially because all it takes is a scroll to get some scoop. Celebrity breakups were once broken by supermarket tabloids, but today, social media feeds into the virality of it all, serving us fodder for armchair observations in nanoseconds.
“Human beings are drawn to celebrity gossip as a means of unconsciously processing our own difficulties but from a safer, repressed distance,” explained O’Neal. “By focusing on people who are more associated with our fantasy life, we’re also less likely to see them as real people going through real struggles. Instead of being critical or reflective about how our own decisions may have led us to face challenges, we hyperfocus on what’s going on with a celebrity, critiquing all aspects of their behavior, speculating on their intentions, and sometimes even enjoying their misfortunes because it makes us feel better about our own struggles.”
Because Kidman’s also in her 50s, it’s easy to draw a direct line from her life’s trajectory to ours, and consider what’s happening in her personal life as fair game. After all, she’s not the only one we probably know who, after 19 years or whatever, split out of seemingly nowhere, and we tend to draw parallels from celeb lives to real lives to make sense of it all.
‘Gray Divorce’ is More Common Than You Think
Given their age, Kidman and Urban are having what’s called a “gray divorce,” which, as PROVOKED reported, is indeed, a thing: 36 percent of Americans getting divorced are 50 or older. Sometimes long-term couples fizzle out after the kids leave because they don’t have enough spark and stuff in common to preserve the relationship. Or, the women just feel taken for granted. “I’ve had so many women tell me they feel invisible after a certain age,” said O’Neal. “They ask: Do I want to spend the rest of my life taking care of this person? Am I going to have a better life without this person?”
Because they’re more financially independent than ever before, more women over 50 want an egalitarian partner to spend the rest of their lives with instead of settling for a relationship that’s become boring and stale. For women who are heavily debating the happy quotient of their own long-term partnerships, Kidman’s split can feel inspiring and emblematic of how women are choosing their own happiness and starting over—on their own terms.
She’ll Be Just Fine—Better Than Fine, Actually
The good news? Kidman has all the ingredients she needs to cook up a happy ending. With a series of accolade-earning plum roles in prestige TV and films and mounting producer credits, she has an enviable professional life in defiance of the way countless women in their 50s age out of so many industries—including entertainment.
Her recent Golden Globe-nominated turn in Babygirl admirably subverts worn Hollywood tropes and societal expectations of how women in their 50s “should” behave. And if anyone can turn a third act into a power move, it’s Kidman.
We’ll be cheering from the stands for our parasocial sister to live her best life all the way. After all, a win for Kidman feels like a win for us all.
great article Vivian! xx
Good for her. She has money.
She will be fine, she’s Nicole Kidman. My husband of 42 years walked out because he’s running from a diagnosis of vascular dementia, based on a brain scan. It was an expensive divorce initiated by him, 2 old people who really couldn’t afford a divorce, to quote my lawyer, but here I am. And I’m not fine.
Kidman was greatly helped by her ability to afford plastic surgery.
Is that all you have to say about her???? As if her life is magical because she can afford plastic surgery? Obviously it isn’t enough to keep her husband. And what’s worse is she just lost her mother!