Everyone is breaking up, but no one is bitter: what is happening?

“Our journey is now changing.”

“We’re still best friends.”

“The decision was amicable and mutual.”

“Moving forward with deep love, kindness and mutual respect.”

These days, if you come across an official statement or Instagram caption with one of these positive phrases, chances are it’s not very positive news.

In case you haven’t noticed, 2023 is the year of celebrity breakups, with dozens of notable actors, singers and reality stars — and a former New York City mayor — announcing a breakup, separation or divorce. Breakups from pop stars like Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift and Britney Spears have kept the internet in a chokehold for weeks on end. And some of the celebrity statements have been so full of aggressive optimism that they can seem forced.

Breakups, especially divorces, traditionally carry the scent of shame and failure, and the effect can be amplified when the relationship has been highly scrutinized. But they can also represent freedom from an unhappy and unsatisfactory partnership. They’re stressful anyway, so why not be honest?

It’s easy to blame the old smokescreen of PR manipulation for all the positive language. But on its own, a cultural preoccupation with appearance cannot explain the prevalence of Gwyneth Paltrow’s conscious separation style.

According to Alex Kapp, a divorce manager in Los Angeles, going the route of collaboration in divorce pays off in the long run.

“What I tell clients all the time is: How do you want to look back on this, at the end, when you’re divorced and suddenly you’ve entered a new phase of life?” Kapp said. “How do you want to look back on your behavior and how do you want your children to look back on their behavior?”

“It’s not light-hearted,” she added, “but it can certainly be civil and grounded.”

This month, actor Hugh Jackman and his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, announced that, after 27 years of marriage, they were separating to “pursue our individual growth,” adding: “Our family has always been and will always be our highest priority. We approach this next chapter with gratitude, love and kindness.”

Singer Teyana Taylor also announced her split from her husband, former basketball player Iman Shumpert, in an Instagram caption, writing that they were still “great business partners” and “an amazing team when it comes to co-parenting “. She added that they managed to separate “successfully and peacefully” despite rumors to the contrary.

Throughout the year, many former couples — including Ricky Martin and Jwan Yosef, Billy Porter and Adam Smith, Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth, and Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello — issued similar separation statements that showed their regard for each other, reflected about many wonderful years together and proclaimed that they would move forward with love and kindness.

Although joint advertising has become more common, it can still seem disingenuous to many. In a society accustomed to acrimony, fans are eager to create theories about why a relationship ended and who was to blame. Divorces need a villain and a victim.

Melissa Lenon, a therapist and divorce coach in Santa Clara, California, said this style of “reactive separation,” with couples going to court in hopes of getting their “pound of flesh,” was what the public expected.

“We’re doing this using our frontal lobe,” she said, referring to a part of the brain that controls critical thinking and judgment, “instead of our amygdala,” a part that processes emotions.

There are times when court is the only option, but for people in the public eye, mediation or collaboration is helpful, according to Lenon. “You want to have control over the narrative, but you also want to have control over the outcome,” she said, “because that’s what’s going to impact your life and also how you feel about the other person.”

Not everyone in public life chooses to release a statement. In 2022, actress Busy Philipps revealed that she and Marc Silverstein, her husband of 14 years, were no longer together in an episode of her podcast that was released more than a year after their split. She said she did not want to follow the “conventional idea of ​​what a person in public life should do when their relationship ends.”

“You make a statement, you commit to remaining friends, ‘please respect our privacy and our family’s privacy at this time,'” she said. “But the truth is, who invented this rule, that this is how it’s done?”

The concept of an amicable divorce has perhaps never occupied more space in the cultural conversation than in 2014, when Paltrow and her then-husband, singer Chris Martin, announced they were separating — and introduced the term “conscious separation” into the broader lexicon. . In a blog post with that title on Paltrow’s website Goop, the couple wrote that despite “working hard for over a year” to make it work, they concluded that “although we love each other very much, we will remain apart.”

Paltrow and Martin emphasized that they will always be a family and parents to their two children. (Their note was replaced on the Goop website with information about conscious uncoupling, a term coined in 2009 by marriage and family therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas.)

At the time, reporters consulted counselors and relationship experts to explain what conscious uncoupling meant. (The New York Times called it a “clumsy new phrase.”) And the online backlash was swift: Critics mocked the stars for their upbeat announcement, which many interpreted as one-upmanship. One advice blogger, Tracy Schorn, said in a particularly caustic post that she was thrilled to see the term being met with “the sarcasm and mockery it deserves.”

“On the other hand,” she added, “the idea that divorce should be free of more basic emotions like grief and anger is still a solid part of our culture.”

Writing in British Vogue after the split, Paltrow recalled how the public’s surprise at the news quickly turned to ridicule: “A strange combination of mockery and anger that I had never seen.”

Now, nearly a decade after the announcement, the Paltrow-Martin model is exactly what many couples going through a breakup crave. “Instead of people approaching me with ‘Why did you say that?'” Paltrow wrote at the time, “they now approach me with ‘How do you do that?'”

What does a marriage mean if a person is happy with the divorce? For her part, Lenon doesn’t believe that reducing the stigma of divorce and taking a positive approach to uncoupling will necessarily lead to a lack of commitment to marriage.

“The fact that we come up with a way to get divorced, or say we’ve kept it amicable and we’re taking care of ourselves and the family while we restructure—is that going to change the number of people getting divorced?” she said. “I think it’s going to stay more or less the same until we figure out more of the underlying factors of how to make relationships work long term.”