News has broken at Wimbledon, a tennis tournament held annually in merry England. Ariana Grande was photographed without her wedding ring, and is perhaps no longer married, or at least she’s headed in that direction. A source confirmed to People on Monday that the former pair “have been quietly and lovingly working on their friendship.” Good. We were due for a new divorce euphemism. (Vanity Fair has reached out to Grande for comment.)
You might be thinking, Ariana Grande got married? The answer is yes, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. It happened in the fog of the pandemic, circa May 2021. Dalton Gomez was—is—his name, and he’s in real estate. You may have an aunt in real estate, a cousin. The point is he wasn’t some fellow star, which can reduce the shouting headlines around a celebrity marriage, making it all a little less memorable. And Grande managed to keep the ceremony itself fairly private—just a backyard shindig with a lot of candles at Grande’s Montecito home. It was all around, a low-key affair.
And it seems as though their separation has been low-key as well. It’s reportedly been going on for a while before Wimbledon intervened and it made the news. TMZ reports that the couple was having issues even before she left for London to film Wicked, in which Grande plays Glinda the Good Witch. They’ve allegedly been separated since January, per a source of the tabloid.
At Wimbledon, Grande watched tennis while sitting between Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey and Spiderman’s Andrew Garfield, while Poppy Delevingne was on the other side of Bailey. Grande was above and to the left of Marvel’s Tom Hiddleston who was sitting next to his partner, actor Zawe Ashton. This is all to say that Grande is having a deeply immersive experience over there. No better way to get over a breakup or a divorce than to go abroad and completely lose oneself to a new place. See: Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love and the Cameron Diaz part of The Holiday and Legally Blonde if you count Harvard as a different country than Los Angeles.