Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin May Have Consciously Uncoupled
Longtime on-again, off-again (engaged but not making a big deal of it) couple Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin have reportedly split after eight years. Maybe the exclusive source is lying to People when they say “it feels final this time,” but the reports of a breakup arriving on the eve of Celine Song’s Materialists feels altogether auspicious. What better way to grapple with the meaning of a post-modern rom-com than to end a relationship of eight years? In Materialists, Johnson plays Lucy, a matchmaker, who starts to fall for a charming millionaire Harry (Pedro Pascal), only for her down-on-his-luck ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) to come back into the picture. Materialists suggests, in part, that our past is never really the past — that old relationships inform new ones just as much as they deepen that which we think we know about ourselves. All of which is to say, maybe there’s still hope.
The titular Materialist and Coldplay front man were first spotted having dinner in 2017, and since then they’ve been seen walking around in Malibu, eating meals, and at Coldplay concerts (in different contexts, obviously). There was always something ineffably cool about Johnson and Martin. She’s the glamorous, mischievous nepo baby of two Hollywood icons; he’s the front man of a band that goes in and out of being cool. They were the platonic ideal of “celebs who date,” mostly offline and existing only as stylish paparazzi fixtures from time to time. Johnson’s parents, Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, were together, then split, and got together again. Johnson knew how to belong in these big Hollywood families, like Martin and his ex-Gwyneth Paltrow’s kids. She’d taken to her role as a stepmom, telling Bustle last year that she “loves those kids like my life depends on it. With all my heart.” If rom-coms have taught us anything, it’s that a delulu sense of optimism — or unmitigated force of chaos — can often power us through the darkest of times. Maybe these two will be back walking the beaches of Malibu sometime next year.
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