Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom

So Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom are done. They split quietly a few months before making it official—three years of marriage after six years together, which is how these things usually go. She’s back on the market, he’s back to whatever Orlando Bloom does when he’s not married to one of the world’s most recognizable supermodels.

There’s something deadening about watching celebrity relationships collapse in real time through official statements from publicists. The careful language, the amicable separation, the maintenance of dignity that mostly just highlights how little we ever really knew about them in the first place. We follow these people obsessively and then find out we knew nothing at all.

I’m not sure why this particular breakup lodged in my head. Maybe because they seemed stable enough, or maybe because Orlando Bloom is handsome in a way that makes his ordinariness disappointing—like he should be more interesting than he apparently is. Or maybe it’s just that when you’ve been reading celebrity gossip for as long as I have, the separations start to feel less like actual human events and more like the inevitable mechanics of a machine you’re watching turn.