Celebrity couples in general don’t do it for me.
A bit of background from me: Neil Gaiman was the author who introduced me to the fabulous world of comics and graphic novels. I read (and now own) Sandman voraciously. I have several of his novels and absolutely adore Neverwhere, Coraline and Good Omens. I used to read his blog.
Amanda Palmer got me excited about piano, cabaret and theatrical music again. I discovered her music at a time when I was thinking about darker topics which her music engaged with. Listening to Coin Operated Boy for the first time on the radio was a revelation. Dirty Business is one of my favourite songs on all time. I used to read her blog.
Neil Gaiman was once married to the mother of his daughters. His stories often capture a love for young, mysterious women and troubled girls and often touch on stories about lesbian and bisexual women. There is a yearning for something. A bittersweet feeling.
Amanda Palmer has had a messy social and relationship history. She started “fooling around with older drug-dealing men” at 14. She had an abortion at 17 and was date raped at 20. She was a starving artist for years. She is openly bisexual. She has struggled with depression. She even drew a map of her soul as a teenager which definitely shows her to be troubled. She had a passionate, difficult on/off sexual, creative, romantic relationship with Brian Viglione, the drummer half of the Dresden Dolls, for which should played piano and sang.
(Interestingly, Tori Amos, close friend of Gaiman and collaborator, is a fantastic creative kooky bisexual piano playing lady who has had a coloured history and was raped after a show. They have never been romantically involved.)
Sometime in 2009, Neil Gaiman started going to her shows and blogging enthusiastically about them. I don’t mean to just shows in his town. I mean A LOT of her shows. In various locations. In fact it was starting to get creepy. Almost-50-year-old-divorced-guy with a crush on 30-something-troubled-passionate-artist (who happens to have similarities to one of his friends).
This behaviour was cringeworthy.
This, by the way was not long after the Dresden Dolls split up. A few months later, Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman both announced that they were seeing each other on their blogs and twitter accounts. Rebound anyone?
Within 6 months, they were engaged. Now they are married and spend all of their time apparently touring with each other.
And since they got together they have never shut up about their relationship. From over-the-top public displays of affection to blogging about each other constantly to talking about their sex lives together on twitter. This is not the sort talk that people have about each other online, in public when they are truly in love. This is desperate, annoying, trying-to-convince-everyone-including-each-other behaviour. It’s actually quite obnoxious. I am still a fan of their artistic output but not of their behaviour.
Even if this is an expression of their true love (as opposed to true “wuv”), it’s still obnoxious and irritating.
It’s been enough to convince not just me but quite a few of my friends to stop reading their blogs and twitter accounts. Which is a real shame because when they’re not posting vomit-inducing relationship crap, they have a lot of valuable and interesting stuff to say that we lose out on.
I couldn’t feel any happiness for them as a couple. I only hope that their relationship is for real.
