Why celebrity marriages are more likely to end in divorce

Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian in 2011. (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images)

The average couple spends about $30,000 to get hitched—quite frugal, actually, if you’re Kim Kardashian West. Reports suggest the reality beauty spent anywhere between $30 million - $50 million on her trio of fairytale weddings over the years. But neither custom-made Vera Wang frocks nor matrimonial blessings in Sin City itself were enough to save her first two marriages from unholy matrimony.

And now, new research from the Marriage Foundation think tank has proof of what the general public already suspects: Celebrities may be rich, famous and have legions of fans worldwide—but their marriages are up to *twice as likely to fall apart compared to us plebeians that make up the general population.

“Although this research might look like some excuse for gossip about hapless celebrities, it is much more serious than that,” says Marriage Foundation chairman Paul Coleridge. “Whether we like it or not we all are celebrity watchers to a greater or lesser extent and some, especially the more disadvantaged, are inevitably impressed by their way of life.”

In what he dubs the “Hello! magazine weddings” — in reference to the lavish celebrity wedding spreads displayed by glossy magazines and equally lapped up by the general public — Coleridge suggests that even if celebrities do set the trend for spendthrift weddings, their marriages are relatively poor role models to mimic.

“All too often these weddings are followed, in quick succession by a bitter and tortuous fallout and divorce played out in the public eye in grisly detail,” he adds.

For their report, researchers examined 488 A-list celebrity couples, mainly from across North America and the U.K., who got married between 2001 and 2010. They analyzed the duration of each celebrity marriage that ended in divorce and calculated an overall divorce rate for the celebrity couples. They discovered that the celebrity divorce rate over the first 14 years of marriage is at 50 per cent and that celebrity divorces are particularly dominant in the early years of marriage:

• Approximately 4 per cent of celebrity marriages end in divorce within the first year or so of marriage compared to 0.8 per cent for U.K. marriages, according to the report. In Canada, it’s estimated that there is less than one divorce for every 1,000 marriages in the first year of marriage.
  
  

• ·The current divorce rate for ordinary couples in the U.K. over a lifetime is 39 per cent— but the amount of celebs that divorce within 10 per cent surpasses that, the report suggests. In Canada, the divorce rate percentage has fluctuated between 35 per cent and 42 per cent. In 2008, 40.7 per cent of marriages in Canada were projected to end in divorce before the 30th wedding anniversary, according to Stats Canada.

Notable couples on the list who didn’t make it to one full year of marriage were Drew Barrymore and Ottawa’s own funnyman Tom Green (married and divorced in 2001) as well as Kid Rock and Sudbury, Ont., native Pam Anderson (married and divorced in 2006). Britney Spears appears twice on the list—married and divorced to Jason Alexander (2006) and a subsequent split in 2007 to Kevin Federline, after three years of marriage.

Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

So—why are celebrity marriages more likely to end in “conscious uncoupling”?

“People who are in celebrity marriages have a lot of pressure,” Irene Oudyk-Suk, a marriage and couples counsellor at Couples In Step in Toronto, tells Yahoo Canada.

Pressures—such as busy careers and conflicting schedules are reportedly at least partially to blame for Katy Perry and Russell Brand getting a divorce in 2012 after two years of marriage. Money issues aren’t exempt in some celebrity marital breakdowns, either. Kid Rock opened up to Howard Stern following his split with Pamela Anderson, suggesting that she refused to sign a prenuptial agreement and that he had more money in the relationship.

Oudyk-Suk suggests that couples in most relationships desire to be in a place where they can feel secure, safe, supported and nurtured. But pressures from a highly-stressful job, or money issues, for example, can take up time and energy in a relationship.

“After a while, if you’re not able to kind of reconnect and work through some of those issues that take your attention away from your partner, then what happens is you start to feel isolated. You start to feel lonely,” she explains.

“But when we don’t know how to talk about that with our partner, in a way that garners our partner’s support—or when the person who is feeling deprived because the work is taking so much time and energy and they’re not able to talk about that in a way that pulls the partner close—that’s when you have relationship problems.”

Other stressful, high-risk divorce jobs include hospitality workers (i.e. bartenders, concierges), nurses and home healthcare workers, law enforcement personnel as well as professional dancers and choreographers— in fact, dancers and choreographers reportedly have a 43.1 per cent divorce rate.

“When you’re in a high-stress job and you’re also feeling a lot of issues related to needing approval, or having to work hard in order to get approval, and your partner doesn’t understand that—then that puts the person who’s working really hard into a position of vulnerability as well,” Oudyk-Suk says.

“It’s not about the issues as much as what the issues do to the bond.”

How do you have a stressful job and maintain the bond in a relationship? For one, people need to be cognizant about their partners’ feelings as well as their own.

“When they are angry, for example, about someone working really late, what’s below the anger is loneliness,” says Oudyk-Suk. “But when you only show anger and you feel justified, the relationship doesn’t improve, because the partner who you’re angry at is feeling bombarded. So it’s more than good communication skills. They need to learn how to go into their emotions and communicate back.

“But when you have a partner who doesn’t communicate or talk about their feelings, then you’re left in the dark.”

*Research based on current U.K. divorce rate over same period.