Break-ups that Seal our fate

WHEN Seal, the singer, and Mrs Seal, the model, ended their apparently rock-solid marriage a month ago, hands flew to mouths in dismay.

Not those two, surely, with their fondness for renewing their wedding vows, their adorable pod of baby seals, and their overt devotion, all set against a red-carpet backdrop of glamour and success? How could that have gone wrong? You hope they’ll sort it out, that they’ll go to an expensive therapist and announce to the media that it was all a misunderstanding and they’re more in love than ever. Then the rest of us can quietly sigh with relief.

But why do we care? Why would anyone, other than Seal and Heidi Klum, and their family, care about the future of their marriage? It’s not like them splitting up will make him tone deaf or her ugly — the world will not lose a singer or model — so why the disappointment when we hear that a popular public-eye couple have broken up? How can it affect us, the little people?

“It’s all about transference,” says relationships therapist Fran Creffield. “We transfer our own aspirations onto those in the public domain — we want people whom we like in the public eye to succeed. Our own hidden fears can remain hidden if we perceive celebs to be acting out the perfect relationship for us. It helps us to keep believing in the fairy story and the magic. But when these public figures become human, they pop the fairy tale bubble that we all want to believe in. This, then, interferes with our transference, in that it interrupts the subconscious transfer of our feelings onto others — because they are no longer acting out the idealised lives that we would like for ourselves.”

This is the only rational explanation for the public reaction to Seal and Heidi calling it a day. On a larger scale, remember when Princess Diana died and the British public burst into tears and sobbed for months? That was not about Princess Diana, a distant aristocrat — it was about the suppressed stuff that she, and her death, represented. People who had not cried at their own mother’s funeral were weeping buckets for an unknown stranger.

For this very reason — our subconscious transferal of feelings onto famous strangers — we like celebrity marriages to work. I don’t know about you, but I would be horribly disillusioned if Sharon and Ozzy ever broke up; in terms of commitment, they are my role models. Imagine what would happen to the world if Michelle and Barack Obama packed it in.

We all subconsciously wish longevity for any long-term couple in the public eye who have established a life and a family together and don’t get on your nerves.

These could be anyone from Brad and Angelina to Elton and David, from Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis to Gwyneth Paltrow and Mr Coldplay. Who they are is down to your personal taste, but the underlying desire for them to stay united remains the same.

Even if couples are portrayed as individually irritating, like Gwyneth and her horrid recipes or Chris Martin and his horrid stage outfits, you still want them to stay together, because if they can do it then maybe you can too. (Obviously, this sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but still — weren’t you just a tiny bit shocked and upset when Russell Brand and Katy Perry, so madly in love ten minutes ago, suddenly started hurling divorce papers at each other?)

Were you, perhaps, fleetingly gutted when you heard about Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, the poster couple for middle-aged liberalism? Or Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, who seemed to have had one of the most civilised marriages in Hollywood? And what about Jodie Foster and her formerly beloved Cydney Bernard, or the jolly pairing of Dawn French and Lenny Henry?

You might even have felt a bit sad when Madonna and Guy Ritchie parted — at last, it seemed she had finally found her Sean Penn replacement. Even the end of the nine-year marriage between Slash and Perla — the hairy one from Guns ‘N’ Roses and his stripper wife — could have brought a lump to a metal fan’s throat; Slash had adored her. He gushes about her endlessly in his book. If people with externally fabulous lives can’t hack it — and they can’t blame over-work, poverty, lack of childcare or poor body image for their marital woes — then what chance do the rest of us have?

“People can feel that by association with the separating couple they’ll somehow catch the ‘separating bug’,” writes relationship expert Lisa O’Hara in her invaluable break-up manual, When A Relationship Ends. Have you ever noticed the ripples emanating outwards in your social circle when one friend leaves their partner?

Breaking up can be contagious; in an era of emotional connections with people we don’t actually know (via social networking, gossip mags, reality telly), the state of celebrity marriages may actually matter to us more than we realise. Given that we are all aspirational, admiring a celebrity marriage is not unlike admiring someone’s swimming pool featured in OK! magazine.

“Us ordinary folks think that if we are slim, tall, rich, famous, good looking — or could overcome whatever problem it is that we confront on a daily basis — that we would be happy and our lives and relationships would be perfect,” says Fran Creffield.

“When celebrities, who have all that we desire, break up, it shows us the futility of our dreams. We will still have problems no matter how thin or rich we are.”

Obviously, there are some celebs whose break-ups are as emotionally meaningless to us as they are to the individuals themselves. George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, Leonardo De Caprio, Hugh Hefner, and Liz Hurley are all serial monogamists (well, maybe not Hefner, but you get my point) who have turned breaking up into an art form; so effortlessly do they transition from one relationship to the next, that we tend to think of them as single, even when they’re not. Other celebrity couples, like Jude Law and Sienna Miller, or Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese, you just don’t really care about their outcome one way or another. It’s nothing personal — literally. And then there are those couples for whom breaking up is perceived as a merciful release. Did anyone think, ‘oh no!’ when Britney Spears finally divorced Kevin Federline? When Cheryl Cole dumped Ashley, or Sandra Bullock walked away from that super-naff philanderer? Of course not. Ditto, members of the magazine-buying public would not have experienced pangs of regret to hear that the many and varied partners of Charlie Sheen, Mel Gibson, Tiger Woods, and Kelsey Grammar had come to their senses and left.

Even when Diana and Charles divorced all those years ago, there was a palpable sigh of public relief that the whole unpleasant mess was over. (So long as William and Kate don’t do the same thing, obviously; we don’t want any more royal fairy tales turning into royal horror stories.)

Already the coverage about the Seal and Heidi Klum split has moved from shock-horror to reunification-by-media. Look, scream the papers, he’s still wearing his wedding ring! He still loves her! The subtext is clear. Heidi Klum needs to get back together with Seal, so as not to make us, the nobodies, realise the futility of our dreams. So no pressure then, but world happiness depends on it.