Well. I don’t about you, but I’ve recently taken to bed since rumours of Brad and Angelina’s pending breakup slithered out into the cosmos. I mean, really. Really? Talk about your shake-ups and crumbling social structures. We look to our rock-solid institutions for hope and inspiration, don’t we?

But increasingly they’ve begun to fail us, leaving us shaken and disoriented. Marriage, we long understood, doesn’t work. Senator John Edwards taught us that miserable little lesson. And even if on the off-chance there was a statistic that bucked the idea, we had to seriously ask ourselves whether or not we had the power to make it work, and better yet, whether or not we wanted that power. But, we conceded, maybe a mature domestic partnership, like la Brangelina, was just the ticket. For even the sceptics understand that one of the primal urges we humans share is the need to belong. (We may disapprove of the caveman clubbing his partner over the head and pulling her by the hair to the cave, but I know a couple of women sympathetic to the feminist movement who will shamefacedly admit to a tiny sexual charge at the idea of a man yanking their hair in the bedroom.) So Brad and Angelina fascinated us so.

Thanks for bloody nothing, Brango! After all I invested in you. Always with my ear to the ground for any signs of tectonic shifting of the plates of your relationship with each new addition to your family! How it warmed the cockles of my heart seeing you snapped out together on date night, with the entire family.

But dark days are ahead, I can tell. Speculation about the couple’s imminent parting is rife in the American media. (The way it was, despite his public protestations to the contrary, before the bomb dropped that John Edwards not only cheated on his cancer-stricken wife with an aide, Rielle Hunter, but he also had a child with her. Edwards eventually backed down from denying the affair, still denying, however, the baby. Recently, ahead of his former aide Andrew Young’s scandalously delicious tell-all book, he came clean about that, too.)

It’s really only a matter of time before our worst fears about the Jolie-Pitts are realised, I imagine. News of the World, just recently, reported that they’ve been in talks with their lawyers to agree to a — wait for it — E205-million split. It is alleged they’re to share their fortune equally. This includes their six children. Of course, this could simply be about preparing possible legal ramifications they hadn’t previously gotten around to working out. It’s difficult to map out palimony details when the passion ignited in a film you work on together so consumes you that it ends with a jilted spouse (poor Jennifer Aniston never stood a chance against Jolie’s sensuous moue) and both of you hit the ground running in an almost reckless orgy of what we imagine to be volatile sex, adoptions and pregnancies. How we watched them with awe and a little bit of envy. They took time to nurture their personal relationship, it appeared, even while pushing the parameters of what a blended family should look like. It was more than mere voyeurism or pop culture obsession. Brad had the sexy-as-hell, smugly satisfied look of a man who was getting it six ways to Sunday, and Angelina, well, who didn’t look at her and see the embodiment of the Madonna/whore? And the children seemed well-fed and happy. That was an unstoppable combination, we thought. All of us leery of marriage looked at their setup and figured we were witnessing the blueprint for beating the eventual tedium and staleness of marriage without ending up alone in our apartments, surrounded only by cats. Hallelujah, there was hope for us.

The seeming impermanence of our situations was not something to disparage. Now we could square our shoulders and face our friends, those smug tormentors who, despite how unappealing the case for marriage they made with their often sex-deprived demeanour (which, FYI, includes a certain mirthlessness, a tendency to make everything a project, and an undeniable look of quiet desperation deep in the eyes), nevertheless looked pityingly at us because we hadn’t joined the fraternity that is marriage.

Still, we should have worried when Brangelina intimated they’d tie the knot when gays were legally free to marry. Why ruin things with talk about marriage, even if it was just to make a political point?

The writing was on the wall for common-law partnerships, even before this. Case in point: when news came last Christmas that Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, the original free-love shacker-uppers, split in the summer. Long-term relationships, their split seemed to suggest, are just as doomed as marriages. If there was one couple who seemed destined to beat the odds, I would have bet it would have been the unconventional Sarandon-Robbinses, united in their political activism, and thumbing their noses at Hollywood by, among other things, refusing to get married those 23 years (20-bloody-three!) they were together. Like the Jolie-Pitts, they seemed happily in love, and more importantly, sexy passionate. More so than most married folks I know. You looked at them and you knew they were still able to surprise each other in bed. So what caused it to crash and burn?

Okay, I hear you. These are high-profile celebrity breakups. Recently Sunday’s Style Observer featured an article, epic in its scope, about couples who called it quits. Some of the couples were local but what is interesting is that they, too, are the moneyed aristocracy. Let’s face it: high-profile breakups are the purview of the wealthy. But the common couple breaks up too. Or, maybe, they don’t so much break up as they break away from each other. Drift apart. Hold on to what is left. There isn’t enough money to afford society-page-headline splits. Regular couples aren’t inclined to endure the messiness of divorce or a physical splitting up; that can become way too costly, especially in Jamaica. The pulling away, therefore, becomes slow and insidious disintegration: flirting with someone other than the partner. Spending more time with friends, rather than the family. Affairs. And then, returning home, at the end of the day, to do time in purgatory. Which is worse than simply packing it in and leaving.

This is why I kept my fingers crossed for Brangelina. What good is all that money and, dare I say it — über good looks — if, in the end, people who have it are just as wretched in their relationships as we are in ours?

Again, thanks for nothing, Brangelina! Thanks to you guys, I’m left marooned in my bed that’s littered with discarded Kleenexes, and curled up in a foetal ball, wondering if there’s a safe place, far away from the slings and arrows of love, some Camelot that we all can go to, and if there is, can we all go there now?