When Mia Mercado broke up with herpartner, she f ound unexpected comfort in the online splits of celebrities
Anyway, when the relationship was over, he moved out and I began to post more about myself. I shared about my job, my sister and, every so often, I’d nod to my newly single status: Tinder is so bad! Did I mention I’m on Tinder? I uploaded pics of my globe-trotting adventures so people would know I was ‘getting out there’. Navigating my raw singleness on social media certainly didn’t feel natural, but I was resigned to a certain set of facts: our lives were moving online, so our breakups had to, as well.
That only became more true in the intervening years, during which time I became something of a cultural anthropologist of social media breakup performance, with a particular emphasis on celebrities, aka the originators of turning personal news into capital-C Content. And bless them: who among us doesn’t want to know all the specifics of that level of split? Who is above pondering which famous person’s PR team gets the first pass at the announcement or which of them will keep running the dog’s Instagram account? I find myself analysing each and every detail of these uncouplings, and not to make light of what they’re going through, but... we’re living in an incredibly ripe moment for field research.
T herecent past has added some truly peak entries into the Record of Processing Breakups Publicly, particularly in the music category, where heartache has been artfully sublimated into emotional catharsis slash some genuinely stirring shit. I am still wondering how Jake Gyllenhaal is holding up since Taylor Swift’s 10-minute, scorched-earth re-release of All Too Well and weeping every time Adele’s Easy On Me comes on the radio. As for Drivers License and all the other addictive, deliciously petty hit singles on Sour, let me be perfectly clear: Olivia Rodrigo, I will *never* get over it.
But if breakup music is the soundtrack to my studies, the moving-on behaviour of the blue-tick crowd is a dissertation topic unto itself. There are posts winkingly designed to fan the flames of speculation (see: Taylor Swift’s grid cull of Calvin Harris) and the PR playbook moves meant to cut off oxygen completely (which never actually work). A bloodless ‘wish them all the best’ statement, a dress worn during a postbreakup interview, a bio tweak: it all invites dissection. Saying nothing constitutes something. Oh my god, he’s not even acknowledging the divorce? Wow.
The truth for us normals is: when you’re emotionally devastated and Very Online, even if you don’t know what to say, you do have some off-the-shelf options. There are memes to recirculate; various categories of ‘revenge’ content ranging from compellingly vindictive to saccharine narratives of personal growth. There are
