As Jennifer Garner said in 13 Going On 30, love truly is a battlefield. That is especially true in 2023, a year that is shaping up to be among the most devastating for love, at least as far as celebrity couples go. The casualties have been immense, from the unexpected rupture of young couples like RosalÃa and Rauw Alejandro to the divorce of bygone marriage goals like SofÃa Vergara and Joe Manganiello. And while some of our favorites have stayed strong, we are now genuinely concerned we might have cursed Hollywood romance with our 2023 Valentine’s Day piece that’s starting to read more and more like a hit list.
Becky G and Sebastian Lletget
Titled “Our 14 favorite celebrity couples who are proving love isn’t dead in 2023,” this February listicle which I so carefully crafted by picking all my personal favorite celebrity couples first gave signs of being jinxed in March when reports started coming out about Sebastian Lletget cheating on Becky G. A couple I had described as being “just as in love as ever.”
The two were never shy about shouting out the love that they had for each other, so when rumors surfaced that the soccer player had cheated on the singer everyone was understandably outraged. They were freshly engaged when I decided to include them in our love fest article, after seven years of being in a relationship. Sebastian apologized on Instagram, saying he’d been tricked and “extorted” by the woman who exposed their alleged involvement and that the whole situation had motivated him to work on his mental health. Neither of them has spoken about the situation since, but the adorable social media posts they used to make about one another have not made a re-appearance. They have, however, kept everything that they posted in the past untouched, leading us to believe they haven’t given up on the relationship just yet (which makes us feel a little less awful).
Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn
We started really worrying that we might have accidentally played a part in all this in April when the news came out that Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn had called it quits. With how private the couple has always been, there was no way I could have seen this coming when I wrote, just a couple of months prior, that Taylor might “have finally found the one.” Joe continues to be the singer’s longest relationship, but rumors that he could no longer deal with her escalating fame and the heartbreaking lyrics of her 2023 song “You’re Losing Me” seem to reveal that by Valentine’s Day, they no longer belonged on a list about keeping love alive. We’re still having a hard time comprehending how someone who inspired some of the greatest lyrics about love could also be the source for some of the saddest verses about heartbreak. Ouch.
Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner
A third couple completely caught us by surprise with their split. Another Joe, who has also been the subject of his fair share of scathing Taylor Swift songs in the past (in hindsight, we should probably have seen this coming), seemingly started a media campaign against his wife Sophie Turner out of nowhere. Less than a month before the Jonas brother filed for divorce and reports emerged about the Game of Thrones actress being an absent mother, Sophie was cheering him on as she had done so many times in the past by attending his band’s Yankee Stadium concert. Just goes to show that you really cannot trust social media. In this case, however, we’re washing our hands, because there’s a good chance the bad omen wasn’t our article after all, but the “Mr. Perfectly Fine” friendship bracelet Sophie received from a fan that night. “Goodbye, Mr. ‘Casually cruel’…”
It’s now September and we’re expecting/fearing that at least one more couple from our article will inexplicably find themselves at the center of a public breakup until the end of the year. All the other remaining 11 lovebirds seem to still be going strong — Rihanna and Rocky had another baby, Tom, and Zendaya continue to be the cutest, and Kristen Stewart and Dylan Meyer may or may not have gotten hitched in secret — but considering 2023’s track record, anything really could happen. After all, it really is true that heartache to heartache we stand.
