
If Nicole Kidman's reported split from longtime husband Keith Urban teaches us anything, it's that it's time to stop forcing our romantic relationships into the failure/success paradigm. The queer corners of the Internet know that already. But the rest of the world seems ready to follow the old playbook, offering tsk-tsks and lamenting yet another "failed" Hollywood marriage.
Content creator Blakely Thornton immediately had thoughts. "Be so fucking for real. In what world is a 19-year marriage a failure?" He asked his Instagram followers. "Like, to everything, turn, turn, turn. There is a reason and a season and not everything is forever. They got two beautiful kids and tons of memories. Let them live."
"This is why I cannot take straight people seriously," he added.
The power couple - often cited as one of the greatest Hollywood romantic "success" stories of a generation - first got together in 2005, four years after Kidman's divorce from Tom Cruise. She and Urban married in 2006, and have raised two teenagers together. They've reportedly been living apart for the last several months, after celebrating their 19th wedding anniversary in June of this year.
And while we may not know exactly why they've decided to end this chapter as a married couple, they've also given us no reason to paint their entire relationship together as a failure, a mistake, or a loss. In fact, all the things about their relationship that we once celebrated - their affection; their respect for each other's careers; their healthy, growing kids - are still real, even if they might look different moving forward.
One commenter on Thornton's video wrote, "I agree with you 100%. When my ex and I divorced after 20 years and he wanted to scream failure, I paused and looked at him and said we've raised children to be beautiful adults and walked many messy paths on this journey. I will never say I failed after 20 years of anything. Whether I survived or thrived, I put in 20 years of work."
Another wrote, "19 Years? That like 2 CENTURIES in Gay Years…'Kim, there's people that are dying' ☕."
Queer activism and community have paved the way for us all to conceive of romantic love outside the rigid confines of a success/failure binary, or a linear "relationship escalator" structure, moving blindly from one milestone to the next just to keep ticking off boxes. With the rise of relationship anarchy, ethical nonmonogamy, and even arrangements like lavender marriage and co-parenting, we've seen more and more lovers choosing alternative routes to domestic bliss that look very little like the conventional paths we're all taught to follow.
That said, there's nothing wrong with being sad about the end of any relationship - even if it's not your own. (There are definitely some parasocial baddies out there who will be taking the Kidman-Urban news quite hard!) Change is a beast, and the struggle of losing a loved one is always exceptionally difficult to overcome. But divorce doesn't have to mean no-contact. Plenty of amicable exes remain in each other's lives, especially when kids and pets are in the picture.
While there's no shortage of queer relationships that adhere to more conventional structures, it would do us all some good to embrace the fluidity of love, sex, romance, and marriage - and would definitely give those of us who have managed to achieve anything close to a 19-year marriage a bit more grace as we move through the inevitable ebbs, flows, and transitions of life.
For Thornton's part, he clearly has other pressing things on his mind. "I simply do not have the energy to speculate on the lives of heterosexuals in their 50s. . . . All I wanna hear about is 'Big Little Lies' season three. OK? That's my baby. So as long as these two are OK, I'm gay and I'm calling it a fucking day."
Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.
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