[ad_1]
Editor’s note: Jill Filipovic is a New York-based journalist and author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind. Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this comment are hers alone. See more opinions on CNN.
CNN
—
You’ve probably heard by now that legendary NFL quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bundchen are getting a divorce. The media speculation machine is now in full swing and everyone wants a reason.
The guesswork is understandable (and I want to know why a famous and beautiful couple would break up after 13 years). And given the couple’s celebrity status, intruding on a painful and personal moment for them is to be expected, even if it is rather rude and unkind.
But I suspect that the public’s fascination with the Brady-Bündchen divorce comes from the fact that this couple’s breakup hits the perfect celebrity sweet spot: These are two people who are absolutely nothing like us, yet they seem to be splitting up over an acquaintance gender dynamics that are instantly relatable.
Brady and Bündchen occupy a rare arena of celebrity in that they are both among the most famous people in America, but both are more often seen than heard. Sure, they’ve had the occasional media appearance, but their fame harkens back to what feels like an increasingly bygone era of American celebrity: when people were known for incredible talent (or, in Bündchen’s case, incredible beauty and an intuitive sense of about how to make the camera capture it).
In our reality-TV-saturated era, where some of America’s most famous people are TikTok teenagers and self-described “hosts,” and the dominant scheme for getting famous fast seems to be radical overexposure on social media, Brady and Bündchen have done far better -decent profile.
Honestly, we don’t know much about their daily lives (I had to Google how many kids they have), but what we do know—the no-nightcap diet, Brady’s fake newspaper, his bedtime in elementary school—are sort of “celebrities: they’re not like us” details that make them fascinating and somewhere between ambitious and endearingly catchy.
Brady’s apparent reputation as a political conservative and his past friendship with former President Donald Trump threatened to relegate him to mere mortal status, at least among his more liberal fans, until he bypassed Trump’s offers of public support. The scandal was averted and the Brady-Bündchen unit retained its golden aura.
But their divorce might just bring them down in the public mind. The general consensus among punters seems to be that the problems arose when Brady announced he was retiring but then didn’t actually retire. Bündchen’s public comments indicate concern for the health of Brady, who plays a dangerous sport, and a desire — after years of sacrifices to thrive professionally — for him to spend more time with their family.
For many heterosexual couples, this dynamic is familiar and frustrating. The wife who steps aside to take care of the kids and make sure her husband succeeds—and the husband who doesn’t seem to appreciate that sacrifice and continues to step back professionally when he needs to, at the expense of his family.
For most of the Brady-Bündchen marriage, both have been at the top of their respective fields: Bündchen is one of the most famous supermodels on the planet, and Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback of all time. But while Bündchen visibly overhauled her professional life when she had children, Brady did not. “I deliberately retired from modeling in 2015 as I wanted to focus more on my family and personal projects,” Bündchen wrote in her memoir Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life.
She certainly hasn’t stopped working. But she retired from the runway and focused more on photoshoots. She moved to Boston—not exactly a fashion hub—for Brady’s career, then back to Florida. And it seems that while she was patient and waiting for him to retire at a reasonable point in his career, she was also worried about the toll football was taking on his body. “Obviously I have my concerns – it’s a very violent sport and I have my kids and I’d like him to be more involved,” she told Elle magazine in September. “I’ve definitely had those conversations with him over and over again.”
Brady also noted that his wife has done the lion’s share of managing their lives so he can play the sport he loves — but that doesn’t seem to have changed his career decisions. “I think my wife, you know, has been holding the house down for a long time,” Brady said on his podcast last year. “And I think there are things she wants to accomplish. You know, she hasn’t worked that much in the last 10, 12 years, just raising our family and kind of committed to living in Boston and then moving to Florida. But it’s a problem, and it’s a very difficult problem to reconcile without just saying, “Hey, it’s time to retire.” And I think we’re coming to the end here, too, so I don’t want to miss any of the kid stuff.”
But Brady, unlike his wife, went full steam ahead. “I haven’t had Christmas in 23 years and I haven’t had Thanksgiving in 23 years,” he said on a recent episode of his podcast. “I haven’t celebrated birthdays with people I care about who were born between August and the end of January. And I can’t be at funerals and I can’t be at weddings. Last year, Brady said he believed he was capable of playing until he was 50 — at which point the oldest children (he also has a 15-year-old son with actress Bridget Moynahan) would have grown up.
In her interview with Elle, Bündchen captured a sentiment that I imagine is familiar to many married heterosexual women who have spent their 30s and 40s holding down the home and supporting their husband’s career only to see their children becoming more independent and wondering what’s next? “I have done my part, which is [to] be there for [Tom]Bundchen told Elle. “I moved to Boston and focused on creating a cocoon and loving environment for my children to grow up in and to be there supporting him and his dreams. To see my children succeed and become the beautiful little people they are, to see him succeed and realize himself in his career – that makes me happy. At this point in my life, I feel like I’ve done a good job of it.”
But she added: “I have a huge to-do list that I want to do.”
When women go through this life stage change and the related questions of purpose arise, it can be a big transition for a family, and they need their husbands to step up for their aspirations, just as women so often step up to can men get what they want in life. Too often, however, this give and take is just a take.
We don’t know what went on behind the closed doors of the Brady-Bündchen household. And this divorce hardly materialized overnight. Rather, like most marital discord, it’s probably the result of years of smaller disagreements, disagreements, and resentments that eventually coalesced into a leaden lump of unhappiness that outweighed all the other good things.
But part of the human fascination with celebrity is projection and aspiration. Celebrities become avatars of our own desires, jealousies, ambitions and insecurities. We don’t really know why Bündchen and Brady split, and we probably never will—it’s possible that each of them even diagnosed different reasons for the end of their marriage. So what we glean from their public statements and the narratives we latch onto tell us a little about their marriage—and a lot about the still-unfinished business of American marriage equality.
[ad_2]
Source link