After Zoë Kravitz was spotted in London last week wearing what looked like an engagement ring and kissing Harry Styles, some wondered: Wasn’t she just engaged to Channing Tatum? Wasn’t he just dating Taylor Russell? Or was it Olivia Wilde?
Styles and Kravitz, who wore coordinated outfits, as they usually do, first ignited dating rumors last August when they were seen together in Rome, followed by a number of other sightings. They have not explicitly referred to each other to the press, but in an interview with Apple Music in March, Styles described how watching his closest friends find love had moved him to work toward starting a family in the next five years.
“I watched my three closest friends get married,” Styles said in the interview, “and actually seeing them trust in something and risk something to find something truly fulfilling.”
Representatives for Kravitz and Styles did not respond to requests for comment.
Heartfelt reflections aside, the sightings of the couple prompted a flurry of questions online and skepticism over whether the romance would last.
“I don’t know, it’s Hollywood babe — they get engaged really fast,” said Maria Ciuffo, a host of the pop culture podcast “Chicks in the Office.” “And it’s Harry Styles. If Harry Styles is pulling out a ring, are you saying no?”
Kravitz and Tatum broke off their engagement around October 2024 after three years together, and she was married to Karl Glusman for about 18 months before that. Styles’s relationship with Russell appeared to have ended in 2024.
If it seems as though celebrities move through relationships — even engagements — quickly, there are certainly plenty of examples.
There were Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, who broke off their engagement about four months after they announced it in March 2023. Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson had a whirlwind monthslong engagement in 2018. Lady Gaga was engaged twice without making it to the altar. (She is currently engaged to Michael Polansky, an entrepreneur.)
Are engagements like a fling for those with endless resources?
“I’m saying you’re the one and I’m making a sort of commitment to you, but I’m not making the final legal commitment to you,” as Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who specializes in relationships, put it.
Breaking off an engagement is also less stigmatized than ending a marriage, said Moya Luckett, a professor of celebrity culture at New York University.
But there are also particular demands on celebrities that can bring a partnership to a quicker demise.
“You are on set all day, you’re having to travel, you’re constantly having to adapt and reinvent yourself,” said Damona Hoffman, a dating coach in Los Angeles who has worked with celebrities.
She added that public figures tended to be less willing to compromise. “A lot of things are just set up for them,” Hoffman said. “So then when you meet somebody who is also used to things being created for their ease, it’s very hard to compromise.”
While the average person typically learns to be flexible in dating, successful musicians and actors may be more likely to feel that they have options. “Us normal people are terrified of losing a good partner because who knows if we can get another good one?” said Frank McAndrew, an emeritus professor of psychology at Knox College in Illinois.
“I’ll be quite honest: I can’t be as choosy as Harry Styles,” he added with a laugh.
Perhaps the most daunting factor is the public scrutiny.
After Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly, or MGK, broke off their engagement in 2024, MGK said on a podcast that he blamed the public’s “evil eye.”
In the early 2000s, before their recent nuptials, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck delayed their much hyped wedding days before it was set to take place and called it quits soon after. “We just crumbled under the pressure,” Lopez said in her 2024 documentary, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” adding that the media attention had become unmanageable. Before that cultural touchstone, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt also famously called off their six-month engagement in 1997. Paltrow later explained that she had been too young for marriage.
“Every little bit of your relationship is fodder and blown up,” Saltz said. “If you have snippy words in public with each other and you’re not a celebrity, you figure it out, you apologize, you move on.” As a celebrity, though, “if you do that and somebody picks up on it, then you’re the front page.”
Kravitz might not provide clarity on her relationship with Styles anytime soon, given her reputation for rarely sharing much of her private life. There was no flashy reveal for her previous two engagements, either.
Of her relationship with Tatum, she told GQ in 2022: “You want to keep it sacred and private as long as you can, so that you don’t have to even think about what the world thinks about it.”
Sadiba Hasan reports on love and culture for the Styles section of The Times.
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