Writer Nicholas Sparks and his wife, Cathy Cote, have separated after 25 years of marriage.Alberto E. Rodriguez
"Love is dead," writer Rosemary Counter tweeted sardonically when news hit this week that The Notebook author Nicholas Sparks was separating from his wife of 25 years.
Cathy had reportedly inspired many of her husband's beloved female characters, their marriage informing the sentimental unions depicted in Sparks' bestselling books.
Reacting to the split, loads of women began tweeting despondently about their own hopeless romantic prospects: If the sappy king of romance can't make it work, how can mere plebes?
It's one reaction to relationship gurus who come tumbling down: people transposing those public failings onto their own lives. It's rubbernecking mixed with a strange, somewhat misplaced mourning for strangers whose marriages emblematized some enviable (and of course largely unreal) quality.
It happened when the husband and wife team behind the popular design blog Apartment Therapy divorced in 2012. For eight years, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan and Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan had built a sizable following as they blogged about maintaining a blissful marriage while living on top of each other in a 250 square foot apartment in Manhattan. The blog inspired other cash strapped spouses and became one of the most influential design sites online. "You start out with certain hopes and dreams, and you get stuck on perfection," Mr. Gillingham-Ryan (now just Ryan) told stunned fans then.
Reaction was similarly aghast when the Internet's most famous mommy blogger, Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com, and her husband split in 2012. The nail in the coffin for this couple's aspirational marriage? Armstrong's husband pleading online with readers to help him find a new job and a "skeez-free place to live."
Celebrity watchers will also mourn certain couples, especially when it's a grey divorce like Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, Al and Tipper Gore or Rhea Perlman and Danny DeVito, who separated after 30 years of marriage in 2012 but have reportedly reunited. Some were also discouraged by the end of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, who dashed everyone's hopes that he wouldn't trade in his older wife for a younger model or two. Then again others weren't into the couple's over-sharing and applauded the end of their exhibitionist marital displays on Twitter.
With the demise of some celebrity marriages, the People magazine-reading public licks its chops. Remember when Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin consciously uncoupled and the news was delivered in a clean font from Paltrow's lifestyle website Goop? Conscious uncoupling, Paltrow's team of therapists explained, involves an "internal cathedral with spiritual trace minerals like self-love, self-acceptance and self-forgiveness." Oh, and it's far superior to straight up divorce and better for the kids, too.
There's Schadenfreude in watching unions like this dissolve – the gurus who tell us they do love better.
Zosia Bielski