Celebrities Twice as Likely to Divorce: Report

Dreaming of having one of those glossy, shiny, paparazzi-filled celebrity weddings with 300 of your closest A-List friends and their manicured lapdogs?

Well, if you’re planning on staying married for more than a decade, you may want to watch what you wish for – because the chances that your celebrity marriage will reach its 10th anniversary is significantly higher if you marry someone who reads People magazine, rather than someone who is featured in its pages.

At least, that’s according to a new report from UK-based The Marriage Foundation, which looked at nearly 600 celebrity marriages – everyone from Barry and Linda Gibb, to Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries – and found out that the divorce rate among celebrity hook-ups is 40%, compared to 20% for everyone else.

It’s a disconnect that The Marriage Foundation’s founder Sir Paul Coleridge says is a wake-up call for anyone – but especially young people – to look elsewhere for their marital role models.

“The picture [these statistics] paint to those who regard the celebrity life style as something to be admired and copied for its own sake,” commented Coleridge. “These are, after all, the role models upon which many, especially young people, fashion their lives. Aspiration for happiness built on celebrity lifestyle is, it seems, dangerously flawed.”

The report, Hello? Goodbye! Marriage and Divorce amongst Celebrities, was deliberately entitled as such to send a shot across the bow towards what Coleridge, who is a High Court Judge, calls society’s deeply flawed Hello! Magazine approach to marriage.    

“There is still, or maybe more than there was, a completely unrealistic expectation about long-term relationships and marriage in particular, that if you find the right ideal partner that’s all that matters and things will just carry on from there and you will be divinely happy.”

To read the full report, click herehttp://www.marriagefoundation.org.uk/Web/OnlineStore/Product.aspx?ID=138&RedirectUrl=~%2fWeb%2fOnlineStore%2fProducts.aspx. The download is free.

And for those curious about the five marriages that make the report’s dubious list of the shortest on record:

·         Britney Spears and Jason Alexander: 55 hours

·         Sinead O’Connor and Barry Herridge: 18 days

·         Drew Barrymore and Jeremy Thomas: 30 days

·         Pamela Anderson and Rick Salomon: 60 days

·         Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries: 72 days