Seven years ago Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow gave us conscious uncoupling now Ioan Gruffudd and Alice Evans have shown us the other way to do it, noxious uncoupling.

Seven years ago, Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow brought “conscious uncoupling” into the divorce lexicon, announcing their separation in a press statement that talked of “their hearts full of sadness”, their intention to continue as a family and a plea to respect their privacy. That was one way to do it. Now from Hollywood comes another way for public figures to divorce: noxious uncoupling.

For Alice Evans and Ioan Gruffudd, both film actors who married 14 years ago, there has been little discretion and no request to give them space.

Their break-up, every last bit of it, every betrayal, every ache and pain, every jealousy and deception, has been played out in public, allowing millions of people the voyeuristic pleasure of a peek into the ordinary agonies of ostensibly beautiful lives.

On one level, it’s a story as old as the Hollywood Hills. In a town where looks count for everything, a man falls for a younger version of his wife. Gruffudd is now apparently entwined with aspiring actress Bianca Wallace, who is 30 years old (Evans is 52, and Gruffudd is 48) and whose Instagram profile picture is one of her in a bikini, balancing on a beam over the Mediterranean Sea and looking like a prototype version of Lara Croft.

“So it turns out that my husband after two years of telling me I’m a bad person and I’m not exciting and he no longer wants to have sex with me and he just wants to be on set abroad… has been in a relationship for three years behind all our backs. Good luck, Bianca.”

Evans, not unreasonably, is mad as hell. On discovering her husband had a new love interest (via an Instagram post of the two of them in which he said he’d got his “smile back”), she took to Twitter to vent her rage.

She wrote: “So it turns out that my husband after two years of telling me I’m a bad person and I’m not exciting and he no longer wants to have sex with me and he just wants to be on set abroad… has been in a relationship for three years behind all our backs. Good luck, Bianca.”

This, of course, transgressed the first unwritten rule of Twitter: don’t tweet when angry or drunk, or both.

And there then followed a torrent of tweets, many of which have now been deleted (which suggests that Evans may already regret her outpouring), and the inevitable taking of sides by Twitter respondents who know nothing of what went on behind closed doors.

Some suggested she should go to a spa and calm down, others recognised the spirit of her fury and launched #teamalice, while the columnist Sarah Vine, herself going through the pain of divorce, put it down squarely to Evans suffering menopausal trauma and Gruffudd not being able to cope with it.

Evans herself then wrote a piece for the Daily Mail in which she lavished us with detail, some unnecessarily salacious, some telling, like the fact that when Gruffudd called his parents in front of her during his marriage’s unravelling, he spoke in Welsh. Ours is not to pass judgement, and if Evans is coping with private agony by letting it out in public, then who are we to deride her?

“Fifteen years from now, do you really think that’s what they will be worried about?“ she asked rhetorically.

“Without this outlet I might truly have lost my mind,” she wrote.
But she dismisses the lasting effect this psychological warfare might have on their daughters, aged 12 and eight.

“Fifteen years from now, do you really think that’s what they will be worried about?“ she asked rhetorically.

I would not be quite so certain and I think 15 years from now when they are getting married or are newly married themselves that is exactly what they will be worried about. Yes, they will have their own adult issues to deal with, but Evans lets herself down by being so casual with her daughters’ mental welfare.

We know the damage divorce – even in the most consensual of circumstances – has on children, and the fact that the world is now party to the intimate details of their private agony (and that of their parents) may cause them embarrassment and pain in years to come.

Twitter may feel like an impermanent medium. Posts are transitory. The ideas expressed are of the moment. But Evans would do well to remember that tweets, unlike some love stories, are for ever.

Courtesy Simon Kelner – i Columnist

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