Zoë Kravitz Is Proof That Being Engaged Multiple Times Is Actually So Chic
There’s a new ring on Zoë Kravitz’s finger, reportedly an engagement ring from her rumored partner Harry Styles, bringing Kravitz’s alleged total to three engagements in six years. And honestly, good for her! Kravitz’ romantic history (without knowing its ins and outs) is very much giving someone who picks the partner to suit the version of herself at the time. It seems like Kravitz switches things up when something isn’t working, walks away, and finds love again. The response to Kravitz’s most recent rumored engagement (she was previously married to actor Karl Glusman and engaged to Channing Tatum) has been surprisingly positive. It’s difficult to imagine the warm reception to this narrative even a decade or two ago. When Jennifer Lopez, who has been engaged six times and married three times, moved through high-profile relationships in the early 2000s, headlines ridiculed her, peddling a narrative that she was perpetually getting it wrong and unlucky in love. Halle Berry, who has been married three times, engaged four, has also faced the same scrutiny. But now, it seems like the tides are turning. Last week, actress and comedian Robin Thede appeared on the Baby, This is Keke Palmer podcast and her conversation with Palmer is so emblematic of just how much that has changed. Thede divulged that she has had, no joke, five engagements and turned every single one down. Keke’s response to this revelation, before they got into the whys, was the same as mine: “How fabulous!” Robin proceeds to recount each engagement and it is almost comically obvious that she was right to walk away every single time. One man gave her a backhanded compliment in the proposal speech, another she insinuates, was cheating, the infidelity coming to light mid-proposal. She tells these stories with the ease of someone who has never, in hindsight, doubted whether she was right not to accept the bare minimum and just be grateful someone was proposing at all. Palmer laughed alongside Thede, understanding that engagements don’t have to be seen as a prize to be won, but an offer to be considered. Judging by the comments, the audience receives it exactly the same way. The fact that we’re in a place where two women can laugh about rejected proposals without qualification says everything. These women aren’t failing at commitment; they’re refusing to let sunk cost make the decision for them, meaning the years, the ring, the public relationship, none of it is reason enough to stay if the relationship itself isn’t right. No one has articulated this philosophy more cleanly than Lori Harvey. Her message across the few interviews and press moments she’s had, has been consistent: date on your own terms, and when something stops serving you, leave, without justifying it to anyone watching. In one interview, she referenced what is believed to be her past engagement to footballer Memphis Depay at 20, a relationship that from the outside looked like an idealistic one between two young, rich, beautiful people in love. Harvey reflects on it as a near miss rooted in inexperience. “I almost got married very young so I think after that it made me be like, I felt like I hadn’t really experienced anything,” she told Bumble’s Luv2SeeIt, hosted by Teyana Taylor. “I didn’t really know myself. I didn’t really know what I liked, what I didn’t like. I feel like I hadn’t really experienced life.” Now, she dates on her own terms: “However I want to move, whatever I want to do, I’m going to do it. And if it’s no longer serving me, I’m going to move on.” These women aren’t failing at commitment; they’re refusing to let sunk cost make the decision for them… the years, the ring, the public relationship, none of it is reason enough to stay if the relationship itself isn’t right.SUSAN AKYEAMPONG This philosophy really resonates with me. Looking back at 20, I didn’t know it then but I had really low self-esteem because I’d never been in a relationship. When I did eventually get into one, it was a controlling relationship and I chose to stay probably because on some level, I thought being in a relationship meant I’d been chosen. Of course it didn’t, it was a trainwreck. In Christian circles especially, there’s a real idolization of finding your person young. It can be tempting in this environment to stick things out and make the best of your romantic decisions. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I began doing the deeper work of understanding how I see myself and what I deserve. I shudder at the thought of twenty-year-old me making decisions for the woman I am now and the likelihood I’d have tried to live with those decisions. And yet “serial dater” and “chaotic” are still the words we reach for when describing women who’ve been engaged more than once. Relationships, dating, and the engagement period: these are all data points; high-stakes information-gathering that precedes a decision. That decision could then be that your partner isn’t who
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There’s a new ring on Zoë Kravitz’s finger, reportedly an engagement ring from her rumored partner Harry Styles, bringing Kravitz’s alleged total to three engagements in six years. And honestly, good for her! Kravitz’ romantic history (without knowing its ins and outs) is very much giving someone who picks the partner to suit the version of herself at the time. It seems like Kravitz switches things up when something isn’t working, walks away, and finds love again.
The response to Kravitz’s most recent rumored engagement (she was previously married to actor Karl Glusman and engaged to Channing Tatum) has been surprisingly positive. It’s difficult to imagine the warm reception to this narrative even a decade or two ago. When Jennifer Lopez, who has been engaged six times and married three times, moved through high-profile relationships in the early 2000s, headlines ridiculed her, peddling a narrative that she was perpetually getting it wrong and unlucky in love. Halle Berry, who has been married three times, engaged four, has also faced the same scrutiny. But now, it seems like the tides are turning.
Last week, actress and comedian Robin Thede appeared on the Baby, This is Keke Palmer podcast and her conversation with Palmer is so emblematic of just how much that has changed.
Thede divulged that she has had, no joke, five engagements and turned every single one down. Keke’s response to this revelation, before they got into the whys, was the same as mine: “How fabulous!” Robin proceeds to recount each engagement and it is almost comically obvious that she was right to walk away every single time. One man gave her a backhanded compliment in the proposal speech, another she insinuates, was cheating, the infidelity coming to light mid-proposal. She tells these stories with the ease of someone who has never, in hindsight, doubted whether she was right not to accept the bare minimum and just be grateful someone was proposing at all. Palmer laughed alongside Thede, understanding that engagements don’t have to be seen as a prize to be won, but an offer to be considered. Judging by the comments, the audience receives it exactly the same way.
The fact that we’re in a place where two women can laugh about rejected proposals without qualification says everything. These women aren’t failing at commitment; they’re refusing to let sunk cost make the decision for them, meaning the years, the ring, the public relationship, none of it is reason enough to stay if the relationship itself isn’t right.
No one has articulated this philosophy more cleanly than Lori Harvey. Her message across the few interviews and press moments she’s had, has been consistent: date on your own terms, and when something stops serving you, leave, without justifying it to anyone watching. In one interview, she referenced what is believed to be her past engagement to footballer Memphis Depay at 20, a relationship that from the outside looked like an idealistic one between two young, rich, beautiful people in love. Harvey reflects on it as a near miss rooted in inexperience. “I almost got married very young so I think after that it made me be like, I felt like I hadn’t really experienced anything,” she told Bumble’s Luv2SeeIt, hosted by Teyana Taylor. “I didn’t really know myself. I didn’t really know what I liked, what I didn’t like. I feel like I hadn’t really experienced life.” Now, she dates on her own terms: “However I want to move, whatever I want to do, I’m going to do it. And if it’s no longer serving me, I’m going to move on.”
These women aren’t failing at commitment; they’re refusing to let sunk cost make the decision for them… the years, the ring, the public relationship, none of it is reason enough to stay if the relationship itself isn’t right.
SUSAN AKYEAMPONG
This philosophy really resonates with me. Looking back at 20, I didn’t know it then but I had really low self-esteem because I’d never been in a relationship. When I did eventually get into one, it was a controlling relationship and I chose to stay probably because on some level, I thought being in a relationship meant I’d been chosen. Of course it didn’t, it was a trainwreck. In Christian circles especially, there’s a real idolization of finding your person young. It can be tempting in this environment to stick things out and make the best of your romantic decisions. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I began doing the deeper work of understanding how I see myself and what I deserve. I shudder at the thought of twenty-year-old me making decisions for the woman I am now and the likelihood I’d have tried to live with those decisions.
And yet “serial dater” and “chaotic” are still the words we reach for when describing women who’ve been engaged more than once. Relationships, dating, and the engagement period: these are all data points; high-stakes information-gathering that precedes a decision. That decision could then be that your partner isn’t who you thought they were, the relationship has run its course or a myriad of other valid reasons. The pressure to see a relationship through however, has never really gone away.
It’s worth remembering the pressure to honor a romantic commitment regardless of what it costs you isn’t new. Back in the 19th century, a broken engagement could damage a woman’s social reputation irreparably, her value in the marriage market tied directly to her perceived respectability, and the social cost fell almost entirely on her. That inheritance is baked into the culture we’ve carried forward. It’s why the casualness with which Robin Thede recounts her five rejected proposals feel genuinely radical.
It has also been refreshing to see this reflected back to us on screen: the stories we’re telling about women, and the way romantic choices are no longer automatically treated as failure.
Running Point and The Devil Wears Prada 2 are two recent examples centering women in their forties who have built full, absorbing, enviable lives around their work and their relationships with friends, family, and the world around them. In Running Point, Kate Hudson’s Isla Gordon breaks off an engagement the day before her wedding, and it isn’t made into a defining characteristic of hers or dwelt on as a crisis. It’s just a decision she makes, and she moves on. Similarly, Anne Hathaway’s Andy reappears as a more self-assured version of herself in The Devil Wears Prada sequel, with no suggestion that her life is diminished by being unmarried and without children.
We’ve again been having a cultural conversation this year around Strangers by Belle Burden and Adult Braces by Lindy West, two memoirs that both ask what you owe to a version of love you agreed to when you were a different version of yourself. Lindy West questions whether she accepted monogamy as her default relationship style, and whether polyamory is better suited to the woman she is now. Burden on the other hand, is dissecting her marriage from the other side of divorce (the “divorce memoir” is also very chic at the moment).
The shift these books and shows are reflecting isn’t happening in a vacuum. Research has found that one in four 40 year-old American adults have never been married, and the average age for a first marriage in the United States has now reached 32, a real increase from previous decades. Women specifically, are increasingly treating marriage as something to enter deliberately and on their own terms rather than as the default next step, and the culture is slowly catching up to that reality.
Women are increasingly treating marriage as something to enter deliberately, on their own terms rather than as the default next step. The culture is slowly catching up to that reality.
susan akyeampong
Predictably, the cultural shift hasn’t gone uncontested. There’s of course a counter-narrative that sounds like she can’t keep a man if she’s had multiple broken engagements. We saw some of that surface in the online litigation about the Megan Thee Stallion and Klay Thompson breakup, where the discourse has become less about what happened and more about what it said about her.
What seems to trigger the haters most, is women making romantic decisions on their own terms. Whether they’re coming for Megan or Lori, or whether the hater in question is your auntie who is suddenly very invested in your timeline now you’re in your thirties (despite being in a marriage of questionable quality herself), it always comes back to that.
To go back to my Zoë Kravitz and Robin Theade examples, when a relationship gets as far as an engagement, it says something about her capacity to inspire serious commitment in other people. The men were clearly there and proposing, meaning it isn’t that these women couldn’t secure commitment; it’s that they were chosen repeatedly, and then made different choices after the fact.
The data bears this out too. Women initiate around 69% of divorces, compared to 31% initiated by men. James Sexton, one of America’s most prominent divorce attorneys, has said that after decades with a front-row seat to marriages ending, the person who files isn’t always the one who made the decision to end the relationship. In his experience, men may often be the ones to file, but women are more likely the ones who first decide to leave the relationship. Ask Jessi Draper or Rachel Lindsay.
A narrative many of us have internalized around romantic partnership, and especially engagement will position the woman as the recipient: she is chosen, she accepts, she becomes the keeper of the relationship’s emotional continuity. It’s why her changing her mind feels unsettling because it asks something of everyone watching. It asks women to reckon with what it might mean to walk away from something that looks fine on paper, and men to sit with the possibility that some women aren’t sticking around for bad behavior out of fear anymore.
The “can’t keep a man” narrative is trying to make the woman the problem in a story where she’s actually the agent, and it just doesn’t stick anymore.
There is courage in staying open enough to find love in the first place, in refusing to be hardened by disappointment, and in being honest enough to say this isn’t right, and holding out for something that reflects how much you love yourself. And what’s more chic than a woman who knows her own worth?
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Megan Thee Stallion & The Myth Of Earning Monogamy
