Delete those Notes app breakup announcements and requests to “respect our privacy during this difficult time.” The latest trend in celebrity divorce is far more low-key.
In the last few years, an increasing number of A-listers have taken the “let’s separate and tell them later (even years later) route.”
Meryl Streep and her sculptor husband, Don Gummer; actors Laurence Fishburne and Gina Torres; and Elliot Page and his dancer partner, Emma Portner, all divorced on the down low. Even Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith quietly separated in 2016 before becoming extremely loud about their breakup last year.
The latest example? Natalie Portman, who “quietly filed” and finalized her divorce from ballet beau Benjamin Millepied earlier this month, after nearly 12 years of marriage and two children together. (Rumors about Millepied’s alleged affair last year were a little less quiet, at least in the French tabloid press.)
Non-celebrities, too, are opting for less flashy divorces, said Lynda Hinkle, a family law attorney practicing in New Jersey.
“I think it’s part of a backlash to how being so public about your personal life has negatively influenced so many people, particularly celebrities,” Hinkle told HuffPost.
“There was a time in our culture where everything was spoken of in whispers, then we leapt to everything being announced in a press release,” she said. “Even for non-celebrities, social media allows for big, grandiose announcements that reach a wide audience.”
For “normies,” divorce parties, divorce cakes and divorce selfies (co-starring your ex if the split was amicable) were big around 2010 and the years that followed.
The divorce party era feels dated now, but it helped usher in a more positive, accepting attitude about divorce, said Morghan Richardson, a partner and family law attorney at Tarter, Krinsky & Drogin LLP in New York City. Divorce went from taboo to something that’s talked about and normalized, to something to…
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