People have very different styles when it comes to dealing with breakups.
Some don't miss a beat and are right back out there, the life of the party, the very next night. No one would even know that a relationship had ended if not for the tell-tale sign of a sudden Instagram scrub. Others prefer to skip going out for awhile, soothing themselves with the comforts of home and perhaps a close circle of confidantes. Then there are the angry, drawn-out breakups, the ones that are more like an extension of the worst part of the relationship, complete with texting angst and social media gamesmanship.
But regardless of how you handle it, even if it's to declare a guy dead to you and never mention his name again or use his name as a punchline for years, full recovery time ranges from a few weeks to never. Point being: shaking it off is subjective.
And that's all if you're just normal. When you're incredibly famous...even crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after you involves some strategy.
Aside from issuing a statement ideally calling the split amicable and asking for privacy, talking too soon can be perceived as a rash move. People will assume you're angry or that something specific "happened." On the other hand, never talking about it can turn the split into a big, monolithic question mark hanging over you for the foreseeable future. Or, perhaps, people might just forget about it eventually, which presumably is the desired outcome when the celebs choose silence.
Angelina Jolie's lawyer saying last September that she filed for divorce from Brad Pitt "for the health of the family" was a loaded little bombshell, not a detailed explanation but one that immediately pointed the finger at Pitt all the same. (Though, really, when doesn't the finger point at the husband in some respect, at least for a little while, regardless of evidence that he actually did anything?)
Even Brad and Jennifer Aniston managed to scrape together, "We happily remain committed and caring friends with great love and admiration for one another. We ask in advance for your kindness and sensitivity in the coming months." And their split, as she would reveal less than nine months later, was an emotional suckerpunch for Aniston.
Same with Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, who went with, "We go forward with love and friendship for one another and a commitment to co-parenting our children whose privacy we ask to be respected during this difficult time," when they announced the symbolic end (divorce papers weren't filed until this year) of their marriage in June 2015.
Yet Garner and Aniston would both divulge at later dates (and both to Vanity Fair, incidentally) not only just how awful they felt when their marriages ended and how hard it was to bounce back, a handful of smiling red carpet appearances or paparazzi pics taken in the interim notwithstanding, but that, yeah, their husbands had really effed up. Neither went into nitty-gritty detail of what the guys, or they themselves, actually did, but they went for the full-court-press analysis in their first big post-split interviews. Gwen Stefani did the same with The New York Times, saying "life was literally blown up into my face" but stopping short of revealing what type of dynamite her husband of 13 years, Gavin Rossdale, used.
Meanwhile, Jolie, who set the tone early on with how she and her team worded their comments last fall, just opened up to Vanity Fair as well in her first in-depth sit-down since filing for divorce. Yet she simultaneously buttoned up, choosing not to really say much about the journey other than to acknowledge that life got "difficult" and now she and her six children—oh yeah, and Brad, too—are healing.
Pitt, in comparison, threw his guts against the wall in his GQ Style interview that came out in May—an interview Jolie was aware he was giving, as he knew she was talking to VF (in case anyone doubted the strategy involved in the process of breaking up while famous).
But for all the differences in approach, Jolie making it clear (with words and without) that she didn't think it appropriate to reveal too much because she has to think about the children, it's Pitt who feels that Jolie went too far.
"Brad has consistently refused to ever discuss anything about [the kids] publicly," a source told E! News after the VF story came out, noting that Pitt knew about the interview but didn't know what was in it before the story was published. "He has not and will not ever discuss them."
It's not as though Jolie talked extensively about Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, Knox and Vivienne's innermost feelings and fears about the divorce, but they did parade in and out of their mom's VF profile, adding to the domestic vibe of the scene (which Jolie admitted she had been working at, having focused recently on "just being a homemaker").
And it's not as though Pitt didn't mention his kids at all. He told GQ Style, "It's just very, very jarring for the kids, to suddenly have their family ripped apart." Asked how he and Jolie were going about talking to the children, who are between the ages of 9 and 15, about what happened, he said, "Well, there's a lot to tell them because there's understanding the future, there's understanding the immediate moment and why we're at this point, and then it brings up a lot of issues from the past that we haven't talked about. So our focus is that everyone comes out stronger and better people—there is no other outcome." And there were various other references to the kids' existence.
So he spoke about the logistics of separating. But in his eyes, that's different than allowing a story to actually be partly about the children. (Jolie did talk extensively about Maddox's role in the making of her latest film, First They Killed My Father, which they shot in the teen's native Cambodia.)
Yet, to Jolie, she may just feel that she and the children aren't mutually exclusive, especially at this moment in time, so to talk to her is to get an earful about what the kids are up to—as is the case when you talk to most moms, famous or not.
But there might be more to come from Jolie down the road. Maybe this wasn't her big interview, despite it being her first (minus a couple of TV sit-downs she did in February while promoting her film in which she tersely replied to a few questions about how her family was doing).
Pitt, for instance, didn't open up about his circa-2005 issues until 2011—and with good reason, because he still managed to poke the barely sleeping bear when he told Parade he was probably all screwed up back then from "trying to pretend the marriage [to Aniston] was something it wasn't." (He later clarified, saying he didn't mean for it to come out the way it sounded and that Jen's terrific.)
Nicole Kidman waited almost two years to tell Vanity Fair that her life "collapsed" after her divorce from Tom Cruise—a split that at least came as as a surprise for her.
"I was consumed by it, willingly," she recalled falling in love with Tom. "And I was desperate to have a baby with him. I didn't care if we were married. That's what I wish I'd done." That was some raw business. The article also mentioned that Kidman had suffered a miscarriage during the agonizing period between her marriage imploding in February 2001 and the interviews that were conducted for the December 2002 profile.
Maybe Kidman's candid approach was to compensate for Cruise cryptically telling VF in 2001, "She knows why, and I know why. She's the mother of my children, and I wish her well. And I think that you just move on."
When informed that he was making it sound like something specific occurred, he repeated himself and added, "I don't care if it piques people's interest. Honestly, people should mind their own damn business. And get a life of their own...My personal life isn't here to sell newspapers."
Fair enough, but enter the monolithic question mark.
While in some cases one major interview stands out as the one (see: Aniston, Sept. '05 VF), celebs have also been known to talk (or at least deign to answer questions about) their failed relationships for years, telling Vogue this and Elle that, creating a little portfolio of perspective for inquiring minds to delve into. Then, 15 years later, they tell Red, "I was so young when I got married. I look back now and I'm like, 'What?'" (And that, my friends, is what Nicole Kidman calls closure.)
Then there's the breadcrumb route, when stars don't pour it out all at once, but instead sprinkle little tidbits behind them for years.
Music has proven to be a popular vehicle for that.
Though if you choose to tell the tale in song, Taylor Swift-style, you hazard a brief relationship being blown way out of proportion. A two-month relationship can feel a lot longer by the time the single has come out, followed by the whole album, and then the video, and over a year later you win a Grammy...
Katy Perry knows the drill. Prism, which featured a couple of pointed songs about the end of her marriage to Russell Brand, didn't even drop till 10 months after they called it quits. And if you think Swift's 1989 extended the Harry Styles saga too far, coming out almost two years after they dated, how about the motivating factor behind some of the songs on Styles' solo album, which just came out?
Music can be a good way to contain the narrative, however.
Miranda Lambert, whose marriage to Blake Shelton ended two years ago, was more prone to sharing feelings onstage during those first months. She didn't say much about that tough time for about six months, finally telling Cosmopolitan for its January 2016 issue, "I'm still processing everything and figuring out where to go and what happened. [Marriage is] a tough business, and we gave it our best college try."
But in the meantime she was pouring it into her album The Weight of These Wings, which came out in November 2016, a year and a half after the split.
"If you want to hear my side of the story or my opinion of what happened, it's all on there," Lambert reminded Billboard just recently. "There's no mystery anymore—take from it what you will."
There is a common thread woven through all of these breakup approaches, no matter how long the relationship lasted, or how it ended, or who ended it, or whether there were kids involved—and that's time.
It takes time, for anybody, to process a breakup, let alone a divorce, and it takes time to figure out your next move, especially if millions of people happen to be interested in what that move will be. A star, particularly ones who've traded on exhibiting a certain enigmatic quality over the years, may not want to say much. Others might feel the opportunity to say a lot too cathartic to pass up.
But while the endless fascination with your love life can obviously turn into a real headache, real fast, isn't it also somewhat cool that, anytime you have a new detail to relay or a bit of hardfought wisdom to share, or even if you want to just go, "Yikes, what was I thinking?!," you have people who automatically want to hear what you're going to say?
It doesn't matter if you're talking about your ex five months, five years or 15 years later, unlike with regular friends and family, the public will always be all ears.