In the spring of 2005, Sophie Grégoire wed Justin Trudeau, son of a Canadian prime minister. She arrived at the Montreal church in a 2004 Rolls-Royce Phantom, wearing a custom gown from local atelier Les Noces Couture and clutching a bouquet of white roses. After the Catholic ceremony, 180 guests enjoyed a reception at the now-closed Hotel Le St-James, where they dined on Alberta beef and danced to Brazilian music. The couple’s relationship began in 2003, on a romcom-worthy first date during which Canada’s future prime minister was so lovestruck that he walked into a lamppost. We know all these details because Maclean’s was granted access for a behind-the-scenes feature to cover their big day. The magazine reported that the ceremony was “intimate and personal,” part of “a sweet and appropriately understated fairy-tale wedding.”
But the fairy tale ended on August 2, after eighteen years of marriage, when Grégoire and Trudeau made synchronized Instagram posts revealing they had separated, in a cordial message shared in both official languages. Their separation followed a well-worn celebrity template established in 2014 by exonerated ski resort menace Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who popularized the term “conscious uncoupling” in an announcement that has been riffed on by public figures ever since. The format is one of scrupulous civility and faultless unity, which emphasizes the couple’s mutual agreement to separate, their shared respect for one another, and their desire for privacy, all summarized briefly in a tasteful text-image posted to the grid.
