Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban showed that when celebrities break up, everyone’s a forensic expert

The clues that Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s nearly 20-year marriage was cracking up were everywhere, according to an internet full of sleuths.

You could tell when Urban refused to talk about the actress in a newspaper interview last September, a full year before Kidman filed to divorce him. Or that time he changed a love song’s lyrics mid-concert, swapping “baby” for “Maggie” in a shout-out to his guitarist. Maybe it was Kidman’s sexy scenes in Babygirl that splintered their union. Or maybe it was Urban’s feet.

“You can tell everything about a short man by his shoes,” a TikToker declared, analysing a red-carpet photo of the couple, in which Kidman towered over her husband despite his chunky platform boots. “Keith Urban’s insecurity in relationship to Nicole’s starts from the bottom.”

Let’s call this breakup forensics: the exhaustive, exhausting trawling of a failed relationship’s public remains. Anyone with an internet browser can play detective and anything can be a clue: the podcasts and magazine profiles; the paparazzi photos and social media posts brimming with subtext. All to answer that most compelling and enigmatic question, “What actually happened here?”

The shocking Urban-Kidman uncoupling of 2025 was just the latest example of an age-old phenomenon that has expanded exponentially in the digital era. No one is truly safe from a crowdsourced post-mortem. Those winsome reality TV pairings announcing the end of their “journey.” The married influencers tearfully apologizing to all their fans. Even couples who are still together.

Just ask the Obamas.

Last year, Jennifer Aniston had to debunk rumours on late-night television after In Touch magazine claimed “reliable sources” told them the former president and first lady were “living separate lives” and that Aniston and Barack were “obsessed with each other.”

When Barack attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral and Donald Trump’s second inauguration without Michelle earlier this year, theorizers went into overdrive. Everything was a sign of an impending breakup.

“Nothing says romance like sitting across from each other on a 6 foot wide table! You hate each other, don’t you?” one commenter wrote on X under Barack’s birthday post to Michelle. One TikToker used the Obamas as an example of “why we shouldn’t put relationships up on a pedestal,” and another said the Obamas’ astrology star charts had her thinking the couple was getting a divorce in “July or August.”

Welp. They’re still together.

“There hasn’t been one moment in our marriage where I’ve thought about quitting on my man,” Michelle said on IMO, the podcast she hosts with her brother Craig Robinson.

It would be easy to write off these sprawling amateur investigations as an illness of the terminally online, or yet another sign of our decaying civility. But Pam Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, which examines media and technology through the lens of psychological science, doesn’t see it that way.

When we pick apart a celebrity relationship we’re not just indulging in (or manufacturing) gossip, Dr Rutledge said. We’re observing; we’re searching for a narrative - “We’re trying to make sense of life.”

There is an emotional investment for fans of the relationship (or just fans of one of its parties.) There is also an element of mystery: We’re all aware of the gap between reality and the curated highlight-reel of social media, a divide that celebrity only widens. From a psychological perspective, there’s curiosity and an urge to “puzzle solve,” Dr Rutledge said.

It’s a heartbreakingly simple impulse: “People don’t like uncertainty right?” Dr Rutledge said. “Our brains just don’t.”

And there are no lack of puzzles in the internet’s ever-expanding universe of celebrity content. Ever since Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet were reported to be dating in 2023, they’ve had to quietly “shut down split rumours” by taking photos and appearing in public together. Gossip tabloids ran with rumours that Will Smith had a side relationship with his Focus and Suicide Squad co-star Margot Robbie. Sylvester Stallone’s divorce came as no surprise, the Daily Mail said, after he covered an enormous tattoo of his wife’s face with one of his dog, who starred in his hit movie Rocky.

All of this is normal behaviour, Dr Rutledge reassures us - only bridging into toxicity if it becomes the kind of obsession that affects your mood and causes you to spiral.

Kidman and Urban’s breakup, in particular, highlights a tension that makes the death of a celebrity relationship so mesmerizing: How is it that the whole world can love and admire someone but their partner doesn’t?

This is why we can’t help but dig into the breakups on Love Island or The Bachelor. But the compulsion long predates reality TV and social media.

In Hollywood’s golden era, tabloids and gossip columnists feasted on the relationships of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Breakup forensics can even span decades. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were legendary partners who brought I Love Lucy into the world, before their own relationship ended in divorce. Ball, in fact, filed to end their marriage the day after directing the final episode of the The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.

To this day, fans of the show still pore over the final episode for clues. “In watching the final kiss, knowing what I know now, I feel like I can see so much emotion behind her closed eyes when he’s kissing her on the cheek,” one Reddit user said.

Now that social media lets everyone create their own personal sizzle reel, everyone’s relationship is fodder for forensics. That guy from college who starts posting shirtless gym pics of himself in lieu of his regular “to the best wife and mom a man can ask for” slideshows. That unsolicited meditation in your Facebook feed from your former roommate about her surprise divorce. The digital clues are increasingly granular, the trails extensive and permanent. Experts are everywhere - with advice for everyone.

“You want to know if you’re marrying the right person? Just ask your wedding planner,” Jacquelyn Aleece once told listeners on the Girls Gotta Eat podcast.

The Wedding Plan & Company owner told The Washington Post that after 20-plus years in the business, she regularly sees couples either follow through with marriages destined to fail, or fall apart before they can say “I do.”

She’s found that an outsider’s perspective helps her spot “obvious” issues that people in bad relationships sometimes justify or overlook: disrespecting future in-laws, encroaching on boundaries, the look of defeat when one partner dismisses the other’s concerns.

Looking at the celebrity realm, Ms Aleece says, ego can be a bellwether: “If one person is really thriving and the other person maybe isn’t as much, I do think it can lead to self-destruction of a relationship.”

Celebrity breakups give us permission to talk about our own flawed unions, said Kesha Phillips, whose mid-divorce healing journey has been viewed by tens of thousands of people on TikTok.

“It starts the dialogue,” she said. “It starts a bigger conversation that needs to be had and needs to be exposed.”

Ms Phillips said she’s received pushback for going public with her story, particularly from men who say her relationship struggles should be kept between her and her husband. She chalks this up to a patriarchal standard that women should “suppress the things that they’re going through.”

“I think it’s been the norm to silence women when they’re speaking out about the systems that have been put in place that keeps them in this subjugated role within a marriage,” she said.

On social media, the death of a relationship - whether it’s a celebrity’s, your neighbour’s or your own - becomes, paradoxically, a way to connect with others.

Mallory Lampkin, a 40-year-old crisis hotline supervisor with a husband and three children, didn’t see the cracks in her relationship at first. Most of the time, her husband showered her with flowers, balloons, Victoria’s Secret and vacations. She said she tended to wave off his bouts of silent treatment as a mere attitude problem.

But since April, when her husband told her he wanted a divorce and moved out of their recently renovated home to be with someone else, Ms Lampkin has been dedicating her TikTok account Right On Time to documenting the divorce process and the missteps in the relationship. Captions like, “Things my husband did to let me know he secretly hated me” have garnered comments, encouragement and advice from women who had similar experiences with their exes.

“I realized he hated me when my 1st Mother’s Day came around,” one commenter wrote. “he didn’t celebrate it with me becuz ‘being a good mom is your job’.”

“It’s taboo to talk about these things,” Ms Lampkin said. “It’s just like you take it on the chin and keep it moving.

“But I remember what it felt like sliding down the shower wall. I remember what it felt like screaming into my pillow. I remember what it felt like to be cooking in the kitchen and turn the stove off and run upstairs and drop to my knees because of how bad the pain was and how lonely it felt.”

The internet may cast about for clues on who - or what - is to blame in the wake of a breakup, but people are just as vigilant for any signs of hope.

This week, in her first Instagram post since the end of her marriage was announced, Kidman shared a slideshow of photos taken during the Chanel show at Paris Fashion Week - remarkable for how hot she looked, remarkable for how mundane they were. Was it an exercise in cutting nonchalance? An obligatory head-nod from a brand ambassador? Evidence that after Keith, her world still spins on?

To her fans, it was all that and more. One commenter gushed, “divorce never looked so good.”

© 2025 , The Washington Post