Divorce

• Britney Spears and Jason Alexander - No, not the Jason Alexander from Seinfeld. Alexander and Spears were childhood friends in Kentwood, Louisiana, and they began a brief relationship on Jan. 1, 2004. In the early hours of Jan. 3, they married in Las Vegas.
  "She just came out and asked me," Alexander told ABC of the impromptu wedding. "She was like, 'Well, let's get married.' And I was like, 'Sure. You know, let's do this.'"
  55 hours later, the couple had their union annulled.
  "Everyone went crazy because there was no prenup," Alexander said. He reportedly agreed to the annulment in hopes of starting up a longer relationship with Spears, but she apparently felt differently.


• Nicolas Cage and Erika Koike - Cage and Koike married on March 23, 2019. They had been dating since April 2018—but they split up just four days after saying their vows.
  "There was a recent breakup," Cage told The New York Times. "I don’t really want to talk about it. I was pretty upset about that and the way things happened."
  Cage has been married three other times, including a two-year marriage with Lisa Marie Presley from 2002–2004.
• Drew Barrymore and Tom Green - Talk show host Tom Green made his reputation with crazy stunts, so when he announced his engagement to Drew Barrymore in 2001, many fans assumed it was some type of joke. That wasn't the case, although the couple divorced nine months after their wedding.
  "It was just a very short period of time that I had a brief marriage," Green said. "I don’t really tend to talk about it that much comfortably [or] publicly. All of that was part of that sort of crazy, whirlwind of a time."
• Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson - Rock and Anderson broke up nine months after their wedding. Apparently, the final straw was Anderson’s appearance in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat.
  "Kid Rock saw the movie," Baron Cohen explained. "I texted Pamela Anderson. I said, 'How'd it go? What'd you think?' And she texted back, 'He's getting divorced.' I go, 'Why?' She goes, 'The movie.' And I thought it was a joke, but a few weeks later they got divorced and they put for the reason for the divorce: Borat."
  "So, it had some casualties. I thought they were a fantastic couple. It's a shame."
• Mario Lopez and Ali Landry - While Lopez and Landry had dated for a while, their marriage only lasted two weeks, allegedly due to Lopez's infidelity. Well, okay, not allegedly; Lopez admitted it to radio host Howard Stern.
  "It was my bachelor party," he said. "...It was spring break. Everybody was hanging out. That was a situation where I was not mature and man enough."
• Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries - Kardashian and Humphries were married in 2011 as only Kardashians can be—in a lavish, $10 million ceremony broadcast to the world in a two-part TV special. In spite of the opulence, their marriage only lasted 72 days. Humphries said that his career suffered when the separation was finalized.
  "I was playing at Madison Square Garden for the first time after my marriage ended, and I was getting booed so loud that it was crazy," he wrote for The Players’ Tribune. "I’m talking feel-it-in-your-bones booed. I wasn’t Kris Humphries any more. I wasn’t a real person. I was That Guy."
• Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman - After dating for several months, Rodman and Electra married in Las Vegas on Nov. 14, 1998. Nine days later, they decided to annul the marriage, but they changed their minds; the couple stayed married for about nine months before officially filing for divorce.
  "It’s important to think out marriage in general because it's a huge commitment," Electra said later. "Besides that, I hate to say it, but it's a lot of paperwork and a lot of emotions. It can be difficult."
• Jennifer Lopez and Cris Judd - Judd, a dancer-choreographer, met Lopez on the set of her "Love Don’t Cost a Thing" video in 2001. They married on Sept. 29, 2001, but they split up in June 2002, officially divorcing the next year.
  Judd told Us Weekly that he wasn’t cut out for life in the spotlight.
  "Your privacy is breached," he said. "You're no longer a normal person. [Our wedding] was a circus. I think several people got arrested trying to climb up a mountain… trying to sneak in. We actually rented the airspace."
  In 2014, Judd offered some words about his ex wife.
  "She looks fantastic, that goes without a doubt," Judd said. "Anybody that would say she doesn't look great is lying. But you know, I can't give you the answer as to why her relationships don't work. I think that it's that it is work. It's whether you want to work on it or not. Everyone has baggage and problems. It's whether you want to deal with those problems. When you sign up to get married, you can't just walk away."
• Chris Kattan and Sunshine Tutt - Kattan, a former Saturday Night Live star, married model Sunshine Tutt in 2008. They split 59 days later. Per TMZ, Tutt received a modest six-figure settlement in the divorce.
  "My client is very relieved that she can leave this two month marriage with some resources that will allow her to rebuild her life," Tutt’s lawyer said.
• Elisabeth Moss and Fred Armisen - Moss and Armisen married in October 2009, but ended their relationship in June 2010. After the dust settled, Moss blamed Armisen for the breakup.
  "One of the greatest things I heard someone say about him is, 'He's so great at doing impersonations. But the greatest impersonation he does is that of a normal person,'" Moss said in 2012. "To me, that sums it up."
  Armisen seemed to agree.
  "I think I was a terrible husband," he told Howard Stern. "I think I’m a terrible boyfriend."

Over the years, Hollywood has had dozens of quick celebrity divorces, so this list isn’t comprehensive. Other notable splits include Rudolph Valentino and Jean Acker (they split on their wedding night), Pamela Anderson and Rick Salomon (they married twice, but each marriage lasted less than a year), Renee Zellweger and Kenny Chesney (they annulled after four months), and Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Esposito (they filed for divorce after four months).

According to a January 2016 study from the Marriage Foundation, the divorce rate for Hollywood celebrities is about 50 percent for the first 14 years of marriage. The analysis looked at 488 "A-list couples."

"Celebs become, no doubt involuntarily, high profile role models," Paul Coleridge, founder of the Marriage Foundation, told The Telegraph. "But this research shows that in their domestic lives these people experience even more pain and suffering than us lesser mortals and in this respect at least their lives are not to be copied or envied."

The 50 percent figure is noticeably higher than the national rate of marriage disruption (separation, divorce, or death) for a 10-year period, which is around 36 percent among women aged 15-44. However, national rates are tricky and not directly comparable to Hollywood numbers, since many divorced celebrities remarry (the aforementioned 36 percent figure only considers first-time marriages).

Another analysis from Medium’s Chiyuan Cheng estimated the celebrity divorce rate at 52 percent, and put the median length of a celebrity's first marriage at six years. Female celebrities had a divorce rate of 62 percent, while males had a rate of 50 percent. That analysis had a few statistical anomalies, which Cheng acknowledged, and it used limited data taken from Wikipedia, so take the results with a grain of salt.

Despite the limited research on this subject, it's safe to conclude that celebrities divorce more often than the general population. So...why is that, exactly?

There are a few likely reasons for celebs' higher-than-average divorce rates:

High Stress Levels - A 2015 study showed that relationships do worse when partners are stressed out. Relationships are especially likely to suffer when women have stress due to external factors (factors not directly related to the relationship).

Given their high visibility in media—tabloid websites, we’re looking at you—celebrities obviously have sources of stress that most of us will never encounter. It’s reasonable to assume that those stressors could affect their relationships.

High Work Demands - If you’re working long hours and spending weeks away from home, you have less time to work on your relationship. Interestingly, studies show when a husband works more during the first years of marriage, divorce risk decreases; when the wife’s working hours increase, so do the chances of divorce.

In high-profile Hollywood relationships, both partners are often working constantly, and relationship maintenance often takes a backseat to career demands.

Infidelity - In a study from the Austin Institute, the most commonly cited cause of divorce was infidelity. We don’t have evidence to show that celebrities cheat more often than non-celebrities, but given that they’re often followed by paparazzi and hounded by rumors of infidelity, it’s reasonable to assume that celebrities have trouble with this issue as well.

Remember, statistics are useful for studying segments of a population, but they’re less useful when evaluating individual marriages. There are plenty of examples of solid Hollywood marriages. Martin Sheen and Janet Templeton, for instance, tied the knot on Dec. 23, 1961, and they’re still happily married today. Jay Z and Beyoncé, one of the world’s most high-profile married couples, have kept their union intact for more than a decade, despite some highly publicized issues with infidelity.

There are a few ways to answer this question. First, we'll look at specific professions and their relative divorce rates, per information from the United States Census. To get the best possible information, we'll also look at industries as a whole.

It's important to note that the U.S. Census hasn't published any recent working papers directly dealing with this subject, but because the Census makes its data available online, some independent analysts have tried to find answers. Nathan Yau's analysis for Flowing Data is one of the most comprehensive.

Here are the professions with the highest divorce rates, per Yau's research. The number next to each occupation is the five-year divorce rate, expressed as a percentage, for people who had been married at least once:

1. Gaming Management (52.9 percent)
2. Bartenders (52.7 percent)
3. Flight Attendants (50.5 percent)
4. Gaming Services Workers (50.3 percent)
5. Rolling Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic (50.1 percent)
6. Switchboard Operators, Including Answering Service (49.7 percent)
7. Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic (49.6 percent)
8. Telemarketers (49.2 percent)
9. Textile Knitting and Weaving Machine Operators (48.9 percent)
10. Extruding, Forming, Pressing, and Compacting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders (48.8 percent)

Some of those occupations seem a little, well, unusual—you probably haven't met an "extruding machine setter" recently. The Census has a restricted number of occupation descriptions, so some occupations aren't reflected in the numbers, and some occupations are probably overrepresented in these figures as a result. A small sample size can drastically affect this type of data; if only a few thousand people describe themselves as "rolling machine setters" and a few hundred of them have had divorces in recent years, the divorce rate for that occupation will seem unusually high.

With that in mind, we should also look at industry divorce rates, as they might provide a better answer to your question. Here are the top 25 divorce rates by industry:

1. Office and Administrative Support (40.61 percent)
2. Transportation and Material Moving (40.58 percent)
3. Protective Services (40.08 percent)
4. Personal Care and Service (39.57 percent)
5. Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers (39.28 percent)
6. Healthcare Support (39.25 percent)
7. Production (38.99 percent)
8. Sales (38.26 percent)
9. Building and Grounds Cleaning (37.87 percent)
10. Food Preparation and Serving (37.48 percent)
11. Extraction Workers (37.36 percent)
12. Construction and Extraction (36.58 percent)
13. Business Operations (36.04 percent)
14. Management (35.75 percent)
15. Arts and Entertainment (35.28 percent)
16. Legal (35.08 percent)
17. Finance (33.89 percent)
18. Farming, Fishing, and Forestry (33.09 percent)
19. Community and Social Services (32.58 percent)
20. Healthcare (31.65 percent)
21. Education and Library (30.13 percent)
22. Life, Physical, and Social Science (28.49 percent)
23. Military (28.33 percent)
24. Computers and Mathematics (27.66 percent)
25. Architecture and Engineering (27.54 percent)

Correlation doesn't equal causation. Bartender divorce rates are high, but that doesn't mean that the occupation itself causes people to get divorced—it's possible that the type of people who choose to be bartenders are more likely to have shaky marriages (no offense, married bartenders).

With that said, here are some factors that correlate with higher divorce rates that help to put the occupational statistics into perspective:

• Education Level - Numerous studies have shown that college-educated women are more likely to have long-lasting marriages. Per the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women who married for the first time between 2006 and 2010 had a 78 percent chance of staying married at least 20 years, while women with a high school education or less only had a 41 percent probability of reaching that same milestone.With that in mind, it's reasonable to assume that professions with lower educational requirements—for instance, bartenders, flight attendants, and switchboard operators—would also have high divorce rates.
• Economic Issues - Poverty can put stress on marriage, increasing the chances of divorce. Less than 33 percent of middle- and upper-class men and women who have ever been married have been divorced; for working-class people, that number is closer to 40 percent. Again, high-divorce occupations tend to be relatively low paying, so it's not surprising that these jobs have higher than average divorce rates.
• Marrying Young - Here's where factors start to overlap. When people get married young, they're more likely to divorce, and some industries tend to attract people who marry young. Military personnel, for instance, have higher marriage rates at younger ages than the general population, and military careers have relatively high divorce rates.
• Occupational Stress - Here's a shocker: Intense work schedules and high stress levels can make relationships more difficult.Many of the occupations listed above are relatively stressful or require workers to manage their schedules in unconventional ways. Gaming managers and bartenders often work night shifts, for example, and telemarketers certainly have stressful jobs. Sometimes, it's difficult to leave all of that stress at the office.

Remember, divorce statistics can be tricky, so don’t use them to evaluate your personal relationships. With that said, by looking at occupational divorce rates, we can draw some interesting conclusions about the factors that lead to a happy—or unhappy—marriage.

That varies, depending on the celebrities involved. While you’d have to ask a lawyer about a specific celebrity divorce case, it’s safe to say that celebrity divorces are quite different from typical marital dissolutions.

Of course, any divorce has the potential to be a serious legal undertaking involving mounds of paperwork and massive attorney fees. Add in a couple of world-famous faces and millions of dollars in assets, and you’ve got an incredibly complex situation.

Many celebrities choose to sign prenuptial agreements to avoid the drama—and we’ll discuss those in a moment—but prenups aren’t perfect. Celebrities often have to take special considerations when undergoing their divorces.

The most obvious difference: The numbers are much, much bigger.

In most states, assets acquired by one member of the marriage are legally considered theirs (unless they specifically put the assets in both of their names). However, California is different. It’s a community property state, which means that couples without prenups (more on those later) need to divide assets earned during their marriage.

That can make Hollywood divorces costly. For instance, in 2011, Mel Gibson’s ex-wife, Robyn, reportedly walked away with half of the star’s $850 million fortune.

Still, while that divorce was costly, at least it was relatively straightforward. After all, attorneys simply needed to add up the total value of each partner’s assets and divide it in two. What could be simpler? Well, hold that thought.

In a typical divorce, assets are fairly clear cut. In a celebrity divorce, the value of each partner’s celebrity comes into play.

Think of it this way: Jessica Biel might have $200 million in property (we’re guessing—that’s not a real number). However, the fact that she’s Jessica Biel is worth something—she’ll pull in plenty of royalties from her appearances in film and TV. If she divorces Justin Timberlake, her attorneys will have to determine how much the royalties for The Illusionist are really worth. She might also own copyrights.

Attorneys for each party must address dozens of intellectual property issues. What if Biel has a smartphone app that’s regularly raking in money? Does Timberlake get a part of that app? What about the rights to biographies? How about the value of Timberlake’s song lyrics? Can you really put a price on "SexyBack"?

Yes, but it’s not easy. Celebrity divorce papers need to sort out these types of intangible assets. Each celeb’s personal brand has value, and determining that value can take a lot of effort. Fortunately, there’s a way to simplify things. Sort of.

If you’re an avid tabloid reader, you’ve probably noticed that celebrity divorces are fairly commonplace. A sizable percentage of all marriages end in divorce, and celebrities often deal with rigorous schedules and constant media attention—not great ingredients for a healthy marriage.

Many celebrities set up prenuptial agreements before starting their marriages. It’s a practical decision; prenups help to simplify some issues involving tangible and intangible property in the event of a divorce. However, Hollywood prenups might include details that seem outlandish to the average person. While reporting on celebrities isn’t always reliable, here are a few apparent prenup clauses that made news:

• Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s prenup reportedly had an adultery clause, which would have given Jolie primary custody of their children if Pitt stepped out of line.
• Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s prenup reportedly has a clause that prevents Urban, a recovering addict, from receiving anything at all if he drinks to excess or uses illegal substances.
• In the event of a split with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian will reportedly receive $1 million for every year they’re married, capped at $10 million.
• If Jay Z and Beyoncé get divorced, Beyoncé will reportedly receive $5 million for each child the couple has together.

These types of stipulations tend to draw headlines, but remember, celebrity marriages are different. When Beyoncé had a child, that (arguably) helped Jay Z’s brand, so it sort of makes sense that he’d sacrifice more of their eventual divorce settlement for every child.

Also, many celebrity prenup clauses are determined by attorneys, not the actual stars involved in the settlement, so while prenups make for great headlines, we wouldn’t use them to judge the celebrities involved.

Those are just some of the ways that celebrity divorce papers are different from typical divorce agreements. Hopefully, this gives you some idea of the true price of fame (not to mention the dozens of factors that celebs have to consider when they decide to get hitched in the first place).

Legally, you cannot refuse to pay child support after receiving an order from a court. A man (or a woman, for that matter) is legally obligated to financially support their children. States set most child support laws, and if the custodial parent files a support order against the non-custodial parent, the state will enforce the order.

If the parent defies the order, the state may garnish their wages, seize their assets, or take other actions as part of that enforcement. Eventually, the non-custodial parent may face jail time. Enforcement can be carried out across state lines, so even if the non-custodial parent leaves the state, they’ll eventually face repercussions for dodging their responsibilities.

If you’re unable to pay child support because your income has changed, your child’s financial needs have changed, or for another legitimate reason, you should contact an attorney to discuss your options. You may be able to file a child support modification request, which asks the court to revisit the terms of your original order. The process for filing this request varies greatly from state to state.

An important note: Filing a request does not automatically guarantee a lower payment. The court will consider a variety of factors in evaluating your request, including:

• The disparity of income between the two partners
• The parents' income
• The payer’s cost of living
• The child’s needs, including costs of education and healthcare
• The child’s standard of living
• Temporary hardships (such as hospitalization or loss of income) on the part of the payer

In some states, the court will also consider reasonable living expenses, but many courts simply look at the net income of each parent (net income is your gross income after taxes, Social Security, and other mandatory deductions). To the court, the needs of the child come before the needs of a parent, so a judge probably won’t consider credit card bills, car loans, and other non-essential expenses.

You may be able to lower your payments by discussing the issue with the other parent, or by using mediators to revisit the child support order. If the other parent agrees to a modification of the child support order, you’ll have a much easier time getting the change approved. Even if you come to an agreement with the other parent, you will have to submit the proposed modification to the court in order for it to become legal.

If you’re thinking about filing for child support modification, make sure to pay all of your current child support payments on time to the best of your ability. Discuss the matter with an attorney before taking any legal action whatsoever.

Sadly, many parents don’t support their children financially, despite their legal obligation to do so. In 2015, $33.7 billion in child support was owed, but only about 60 percent of that money was actually received by custodial parents. Only 21.7 percent of all custodial parents requested government assistance in collecting child support.