Split Personalities

So, I hear that Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson are calling it a day on their two year old marriage. Which, as some joker on the Internet pointed out, is making a lot of men and women out there extremely happy.

In the little flat that I share with Saffy and Amanda, the news has been greeted with the kind of shock that you would normally associate with, say, Oprah knocking on your front door.

“They were such a beautiful couple,” Amanda sighed the other day while flipping the pages of her latest copy of US Weekly. “So beautiful.”

“That body!” Saffy moaned.

Amanda looked up. “Whose body?”

Saffy’s eyes widened. “Ryan’s, course! Those abs of his! Oh. My. God. I would give my left little toe to be able to run my fingers all over that body!”

“Oh, I thought maybe you were talking about Scarlett’s. I loved her in that skin tight leotard in ‘Ironman 2’! They seemed so happy on the red carpet,” Amanda said, her fingers lovingly tracing, on the magazine, Scarlett’s outfit at the Oscars. “Who knew they were having problems?”

“So sad,” Saffy said, her head shaking.

As I later told Barney Chen, they could not have been sadder if their own father had been caught on TV entertaining a hooker in a Geylang brothel. “It’s not as if they’re bosom buddies with Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson!” I said. “In fact, they didn’t even know who Ryan Reynolds was until they watched ‘Blade Trinity’!”

“Ooooh, I loved that movie!” Barney Chen crooned. “All those half-naked men running around with blades and guns! It was so stupid, it was fabulous!”

“Well, now Saffy has those pictures of Ryan Reynolds tied up in chains in that dungeon as her screensaver on her phone and laptop. She’s even started up a scrapbook. What is she, twelve?”

“Who can blame her!”

It’s a little strange how celebrity obsessed we’ve all become. Slavishly, we follow every step and mis-step of people we don’t know and whom we will never meet. Thanks to Twitter, we now know exactly what Ashton Kutcher is up to at any given time. We know what TV show Oprah is watching tonight. Thanks to Gawker.com, we know who Angelina Jolie was having dinner with two days ago.

Over time, we become so connected and attached to them that when something tragic happens to them, it’s almost like a death in our own family. When Heath Ledger passed away, Saffy sat in her room and sobbed, while Amanda and Barney had a sleep-over and watched all his movies in one sitting; though Amanda later said that Barney insisted they watch ‘Brokeback Mountain’ twice.

And now, the untimely divorce of Ryan and Scarlett. Saffy says this sort of thing always happens in threes, and is now scouring Gawker for clues as to who the next two couples heading for Splitsville will be.

Over lunch, Sharyn said maybe it would be a Mediacorp couple and began speculating. She didn’t get very far because Saffy interrupted her with a look of death and said, “We’re talking about genuine celebrities, Sharyn! Like Brad and Angelina. Or Johnny and Vanessa. People with real money and star power! We don’t care about local artiste couples who are so cheapskate that they get their weddings sponsored!”

“Wah, like that, one, ah!” Sharyn said and took a sip of her sugar-cane juice. Later, on Facebook, she posted just one word: “Cheem.”

The other day, Amanda said that it’s a wonder that people in Hollywood get married in the first place. “It’s bad enough trying to date in the first place,” she said as she got ready for dinner with Peter, an oncologist she’d met online.

“Can you imagine having to do it all with the whole world watching as well? And then you go and give all those interviews to Vanity Fair saying how fulfilled you are and how you’ve found your soul mate and the next thing you know, you read about your husband’s affairs on Perez Hilton and you’re giving interviews to Larry King on CNN about how unhappy you really were in your marriage! It’s so tragic! I’m not sure I should be wearing this dress. It’s not showing enough cleavage. Get out of my room, Jason, I need to change!”

Saffy piped up and said it just goes to show that marriage is all a waste of time. “If two beautiful people like Ryan and Scarlett with all their looks and money can’t make it work, what hope do the rest of us have?”

You couldn’t help but notice how Amanda just stood in front of the mirror and stared at her reflection.