Tuesday, July 1, 2008

why celebrity marriages fail

I was intrigued by the Yahoo headline “4 Reasons Why Celebrity Couples Fail.” When I’m not worrying about world hunger and peace in the Middle East, I have wondered why celebrities bother marrying in the first place, considering the odds. (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward vs. everybody else.)

The Yahoo blog post was pretty thin, though. I swear, she just made it all up off the top of her head.

I’ve given my theories a lot more thought.

Reason No. 1: They’re just too damn hot
We all tend to end up with mates who are roughly as attractive as ourselves. So, imagine if your dating pool included George Clooney, Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vanessa Williams—not to mention all those lingerie models and back-up dancers running around looking all hot n shit.

If you’ve ever been to a buffet and ended up with a plate loaded down with enough to feed a small developing nation because everything looks so yummy, then you understand the trouble celebrities must have in settling for just one super-hot spouse.

Reason No. 2: They fall in love on movie sets
Rather than falling in love with each other, they fall in love with the characters they’re playing, then fall out of love once the last vestiges of whoever they were pretending to be drops off and they turn back into regular super-hot, super-rich shmoes.

Reason No. 3: They’re actor-shmactors
Not all of them of course, sometimes they’re rock stars. But movie stars are paid large sums of money to be the characters other people want them to be. Can you turn off that tendency in real life? Will Katie Holmes suddenly one day realize she’s just been playing The Little Woman in a movie called Tom Cruise’s Life and want a new role?

Reason No. 4: Celebrity nurtures narcissism
For people who are even slightly narcissistic to begin with—and I’d argue that anyone who seeks the limelight must have a bit of that—celebrity is like gasoline on a red ember. And that’s not great for relationships. If they find another celebrity (narcissist) mate, they won’t get the attention and adulation they feel is their due. If they find a non-celebrity mate, then they’re probably pretty sure they deserve better.

Reason No. 5: They don’t need the paycheck
Marriage remains an economic arrangement. If you don’t need the money, if you can pay well-trained child care professionals to help with the kids, if you never have to fill the refrigerator or make the bed, if your paycheck is enough to cover your own needs and the needs of your entire extended family, why bother working through the rough patches in a marriage when you can just move on without a blip in your quality of life? What's your motivation?

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It seems like a lot of the yahoo blogs are like that... their career blogs especially are the worst. (I swear I actually read one once that was basically like: "5 Ways To Get Fired: Not Show Up, Drink On The Job, Surf Internet For Porn On Your Company Computer, Steal office supplies, Insult Your Boss")