At this point, the celebrity divorce announcement via Notes app has become a tried and true genre of Instagram post, one with recognizable trappings: The couple frequently affirms that they still love each other, that they’re committed to co-parenting, good divorce vibes only, etc. I didn’t think one of these statements still had the capacity to surprise me—until this week, when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted his. Actors and influencers are one thing, but now heads of state are following the social media divorce playbook?
I shouldn’t have been so taken aback—it turns out Finland’s luminous former Prime Minister Sanna Marin got there first, announcing her split from her husband on Instagram Stories in May. Trudeau’s statement did have one departure from the norm that I appreciated, however: He posted it in both English and French, a nod to Canada’s Québécois population. Merci for that, monsieur!
Another reason I shouldn’t have been shocked by Trudeau’s divorce from Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, his wife of 18 years, is that it kind of seems like everyone’s getting divorced right now. The last few weeks alone have seen Ariana Grande, Ariana Grande’s rumored new boyfriend, Sofía Vergara and Joe Manganiello, Tina Knowles Lawson, and more announce divorces. A little before that, it was former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his longtime wife, Chirlane McCray. We’ve got a hot divorce summer on our hands, it seems.
But, the fact is that there are always going to be couples breaking up all the time. Is this summer really any more divorcey than, say, the summer of 2015, a season when so many couples were ripped asunder that outlets like USA Today and the New York Times saw fit to publish pieces with headlines like “Why Did So Many Famous Couples Break Up This Summer?” After all, though a sitting prime minister divorcing is big, I think we can all agree that it doesn’t register as high on the breakup Richter scale as Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, the big celebrity divorce of 2015.
(By the way, summer 2015 also claimed the end of Gwen Stefani’s marriage to Gavin Rossdale and Blake Shelton’s to Miranda Lambert, paving the way for Stefani and Shelton to get together a little while later, meaning we should all be on the lookout for some of these recently single parties to grab onto one another. Grande is already ahead of the game in that respect, but wouldn’t Trudeau and McCray be a fun pairing, or Manganiello and Marin?)
In any case, there are still a few interesting explanations for the possible uptick in big-ticket divorces that are worth noting:
Summer itself: As a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal about celebrity divorce noted, summer is sometimes when kids head off to camp or college, “leaving their empty-nester parents to realize they’ve grown apart.” Summer is also, paradoxically, wedding season, and there’s nothing more relationship-shattering than witnessing a beautiful wedding and comparing it to your own crumbling relationship.
Uncertain times: The Journal piece also cited the writers’ and actors’ strikes as factors that might be adding stress to celebrity marriages. One prominent celebrity divorce lawyer told the paper that her business always ticks up in times of financial precarity. BRB, checking on Canada’s economy …
Pandemic fallout: We shouldn’t discount how many couples are still dealing with the impact of COVID on their relationships. In some cases, their relationships just aren’t the same in “the real world”—some sources reported that because Grande and her ex, Dalton Gomez, fell in love and got engaged during the height of the pandemic, he didn’t have a real understanding of what it meant to date such a public person. In other cases, spending so much time together or just the world changing so much may have led to big reconsiderations of how people want to live their lives.
Public relations strategy: Summer is traditionally a good time to attempt to bury news, and when one big couple breaks up, sometimes other couples try to piggyback on their announcement, with the idea that maybe their news won’t get as much attention when people are focused on other things. Is there a chance Trudeau watched all the heat Grande was taking and decided now was the right time to pull the trigger? Seems unlikely, but it’s possible.
Venus retrograde: The planet of love and beauty has been in retrograde since July 21. What that means is, astrologically speaking, it’s a time heavily associated with breakups and relationship troubles. As Cosmopolitan pointed out, Venus retrograde is in Leo, the sign of the entertainer, this time, and funnily enough, the last time it was in Leo was in the infamous summer of 2015. The retrograde will continue until Sept. 3, meaning we’ve still got a potentially dangerous few weeks ahead of us. Stay safe out there, everyone.
