Celebrity Breakups That Hit Fans Hard

Breakups are hard, and sometimes the breakups that hurt the most aren't even our own. When we invest in a celebrity couple, it's actually pretty normal for their split to hit us pretty hard. "We've all been encouraged to project our fantasy lives onto celebrities, so when a couple we identify with breaks up, it's slightly as if it's happening to us," explained Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D. to Self. "We project all our past hurts onto the media image, and imagine the celeb feels like we do."

While every celebrity breakup hurts in its own way, some hurt a little more than others. In 2023, for instance, when Taylor Swift broke up with her long-term boyfriend Joe Alwyn, fans took it very personally, many of them even making the pilgrimage to a spot where the lovers once lived together to pay their respects. Then there was the time in 2012, when Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson broke up, that one fan posted a video of herself in tears on YouTube.

Let's take a look back through history at some of the most soul-crushing celebrity breakups and how the fans reacted.

Before Taylor and Joe, there was Brad and Jen. The it-couple of the '90s, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were everyone's idea of true love. The pair first got together in 1998, tying the knot in 2000 in an ultra-romantic Malibu ceremony. "I know that we have something special, especially in all this chaos," Aniston told W Magazine in 2003. "In this nutty, brilliant, wonderful, hard business that we have, it's nice to have somebody who's anchored and knows you, really knows all of you." 

However, the seemingly perfect marriage came crashing down when Pitt met Angelina Jolie on the set of "Mr and Mrs Smith" in 2004 and cheating rumors began to spread. By 2005, he and Aniston had officially parted ways. For Aniston, the breakup was tough. "Am I lonely? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. Am I confused? Yes. Do I have my days when I've thrown a little pity party for myself? Absolutely. But I'm also doing really well," she told Vanity Fair later that year.

Fans were shocked by the couple's demise. In fact, over 15 years later, many fans still held out hope the pair might work things out. When Pitt and Aniston took part in a Zoom play reading in 2020, fans were thrilled. "I could write 10,000 words on this video. Jennifer Aniston is playing it so f***ing cool but Brad Pitt is clearly embarrassed. I LOVE MY DIVORCED PARENTS," wrote fan Jamie Jirak on Twitter. 

Another couple who first won our hearts on screen was Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling. These two co-starred in "The Notebook," which has since become one of the quintessential romance movies. For a while, fans thought that the stars' real-life relationship would be just as beautiful. After initially disliking each other on set, the pair allegedly started dating after the movie wrapped. Fans were thrilled when the real-life couple won the Teen Choice Award for Best Kiss and recreated their famous kiss in the rain live on stage. 

"['The Notebook'] introduced me to one of the great loves of my life," Gosling later told GQ. "But people do Rachel and me a disservice by assuming we were anything like the people in that movie. Rachel and my love story is a hell of a lot more romantic than that." It's no wonder fans were obsessed.

However, after two years of dating, the couple decided to part ways. Funnily enough, Gosling found that some fans were even more upset than he and McAdams seemed to be.  "Women are mad at me," he said. "A girl came up to me on the street and she almost smacked me ... I feel like I want to give people hugs, they seem so sad."

For millennials, few couples epitomized high school love quite like Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron — after all, the pair met and fell in love on the set of "High School Musical." "We created a bond right from the start. We were like, 'We're doing this, it's us or nothing,'" Hudgens said on The Hollywood Reporter's "Awards Chatter" podcast. After four years, however, the high school sweethearts split. "They are 100 percent still good friends," once source told People at the time.

Good friends or not, fans of the pair were not happy. However, as it turns out, fans might have been partly to blame for the split in the first place. Apparently, Hudgens started to hate Efron's fans.  "I went through a phase when I was really mean because I was so fed up," she said. "Girls were running after him, and I was giving them death stares. Then I realized that's not what that's about."

Nevertheless, some fans still rooted for the pair to get back together. In fact, after Hudgens broke up with Austin Butler years later, many fans hoped Efron might re-enter the picture. "It may not be what this generation deserves but it's what we need," tweeted one.

Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber were another couple who, in their time, were pop royalty. The pair dated intermittently from 2010 until 2018 and their relationship became pretty serious, with the couple even moving in together at one point. After their final breakup in March 2018, Bieber began seeing his now-wife Hailey Baldwin (allegedly for a second time).

Even though fans loved "Jelena," their relationship certainly wasn't without drama — in fact, there's still plenty of Jelena drama, despite Bieber's marriage to Hailey. There has been an alleged feud between Hailey and Gomez for years, and Hailey has claimed that Jelena fans constantly bully her online. "I've had to work a lot of this through with a therapist, because it had got to a point where they'd gotten way too crazy for me, and I was really anxious all the time," Hailey even told the Evening Standard about the Jelena trolls. One Jelena fan page on Instagram still has over 13,000 followers. Clearly, fans are still not over the end of this romance.

When Cara Delevingne and Ashley Benson started dating in 2018, fans of both the model and the "Pretty Little Liars" star were thrilled. The pair dated until 2020 when People reported, "Their relationship just ran its course." 

"I know it's not my business but i'm sad Cara Delevinge and Ashley Benson broke up," one fan of the couple tweeted. Another fan wrote for Vogue, "I can't deny how bummed I was to see that Benson and Delevigne had split." Some fans of Delevingne were so distraught by the split that they began trolling Benson. In fact, Delevingne had to post an Instagram story asking her fans to stop posting hateful messages to her ex. 

"It's more important now than ever to spread love, not hate," she wrote. "To everyone hating on [Benson] please stop. You don't know the truth, only her and I do and that's exactly how it should be," she wrote (via Daily Mail).

From appearing in prestige British dramas to starring in West End stage productions, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh seemed like a match made in thespian heaven. During the early '90s, the British papers knew them as "Ken and Em." However, the pair's divorce in 1995 hit fans hard — especially after it was revealed that Branagh had cheated on Thompson with her former "Howard's End" co-star, Helena Bonham-Carter.

"I was utterly, utterly blind to the fact that he had relationships with other women on set," Thompson later said to The New Yorker. "What I learned was how easy it is to be blinded by your own desire to deceive yourself." Thompson later channeled her feelings about the split in a scene in "Love Actually" in which her character discovers her husband has been having an affair. "I had my heart very badly broken by Ken. So I knew what it was like to find the necklace that wasn't meant for me," she once said at an event (via Daily Mail). "Well it wasn't exactly that, but we've all been through it."

Even though Thompson has since moved on, not all of her fans have. "It's been 20 years and I'll still never forgive Kenneth Branagh for what he did to Emma Thompson," tweeted one, echoing the feelings of many others.

One of the original celebrity couples was Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson, who first found fame as co-stars of "The O.C." While their characters fell in love on screen, the actors also began dating in real life. The relationship allegedly lasted for three years. Naturally, fans were obsessed. 

As Isabel Jones explained in InStyle, she assumed, as a young fan of the show, that Brody and Bilson's relationship was just like Summer and Seth's romance on the show. "When their relationship moved offscreen as well, I failed to see a divide between the quirky rich SoCal kids and their (likely similarly wealthy) real-life counterparts," she wrote. So when the pair broke up, it was nothing short of devastating, especially as it came around the same time of the show's final season.

It seems that Bilson knows just how much fans loved her relationship with Brody. In fact, when InStyle tweeted about the infamous breakup, Bilson even replied, "I'M SORRY!!!! He fared really well!" (via Glamour).