This article contains brief mentions of substance misuse and suicidal ideation.
It’s not surprising to see celebrities jump into relationships headfirst. But while some whirlwind Hollywood love stories have withstood the test of time, others haven’t been so fortunate. Here’s a look back at times celebs fell in love fast, but the relationships ended in disaster:
1. Less than three months after they first started dating, Britney Spears and Kevin Federline tied the knot in September 2004. Exactly a year later, they welcomed their first child, and a year on from that, they had their second.
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However, by 2006, Britney had filed for divorce from Kevin, citing “irreconcilable differences.” The divorce was finalized the following year, with the pair agreeing to share custody of their kids, but Kevin was later awarded sole custody when Britney was placed under a tight conservatorship agreement.
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Fast forward to 2022, and Kevin — who requested more child support payments from Britney in 2018 — publicly claimed that their sons were choosing not to see her, which Britney described as “hurtful.”
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This year, things have gotten messier between the exes, namely since the release of Kevin’s memoir, You Thought You Knew, began circulating online. In the book, Kevin makes a series of claims about Britney, including that she used cocaine while breastfeeding, drank alcohol while pregnant, and sometimes stood outside her kids’ bedroom at night with a “knife in her hand.” Britney hit back at the claims on X, writing, “The constant gaslighting from ex-husband is extremely hurtful and exhausting. I have always pleaded and screamed to have a life with my boys. Relationships with teenage boys is complex. I have felt demoralized by this situation and have always asked and almost begged for them to be a part of my life.”
2. Kaley Cuoco and tennis player Ryan Sweeting memorably met, got engaged, and married within six months back in 2013. The following year, the Big Bang Theory actor joked about how fast-paced their relationship was during an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. “We texted a little bit, dinner was great, and then he moved in the next day,” she said. “It sounds so slutty, but it wasn’t…It all did move quite fast on paper, but we really did know!”
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But just months after shrugging off divorce rumors in 2015, Kaley ended up filing to end her and Ryan’s marriage, citing “irreconcilable differences.” A few years later, once she’d moved on with and gotten engaged to Karl Cook, Kaley said in an interview that her ex had “ruined” her idea of marriage. “I honestly thought I wouldn’t get married again. My ex ruined that word for me,” she shared. “I married someone the first time who completely changed. The person I ended up with was not the person I originally met. And that wasn’t my fault —that was his.”
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3. Perhaps one of the most memorable whirlwind celeb relationships was Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson’s back in 2018. In the space of five months, the pair went on their first date, got engaged, and parted ways — and things definitely got messy following the split.
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Ariana memorably described her relationship with Pete as an “amazing distraction” during a 2019 interview with Vogue. “I met Pete, and it was an amazing distraction. It was frivolous and fun and insane and highly unrealistic, and I loved him, and I didn’t know him,” she said.
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Pete later addressed Ariana’s comments during a stand-up gig, poking fun at her then-infamous fake tan in the process. “Can you imagine if I did that? My career would be over tomorrow. If I spray-painted myself brown and hopped on the cover of Vogue magazine and just started shitting on my ex,” he said.
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Separately, during a performance at the 2020 Grammys, Ariana removed an engagement ring from her finger, put it in a box, and shook her head. When later asked about the pointed move, Pete called Ariana “the queen of shade.” Yikes.
4. Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries dated for just six months before getting engaged and later having a televised “fairytale” wedding. However, just 72 days later, Kim ended up filing for divorce.
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Kris memorably sought an annulment, claiming that Kim had only married him to boost ratings for Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The split was ultimately resolved through a standard divorce, and years later, Kim admitted during the 2021 KUWTK reunion that she’d tried to apologize to Kris for how she handled the short-lived marriage.
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“I tried calling him for months,” she said, before claiming that she’d bumped into him at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and he’d completely ignored her: “I saw him and all of his friends got up from the table, we had the tables next to each other. All of his friends got up and said hi to me and he literally just looked at me and like wouldn’t even speak to me.”
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Elsewhere during the reunion, Kim recalled getting “cold feet” just before the wedding, but feeling “pressured” to follow through with it because she didn’t want to “let everyone down.” “I thought, we’re filming this for a TV show,” she said, adding that she didn’t want to be known as a “runaway bride” forever.
“We get to Italy for our honeymoon, and I was like, ‘Fuck, I think I made the wrong decision,’” she recalled. “And then I went to New York, and I was miserable. And I thought, you know what? If you have cold feet — for anyone out there listening, if you have cold feet, it’s not it.”
5. Demi Lovato and Max Ehrich were first linked in March 2020 — and just four months later, they were engaged! Demi wrote on Instagram, “@maxehrich—I knew I loved you the moment I met you. It was something I can’t describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand but luckily you did too. I’ve never felt so unconditionally loved by someone in my life (other than my parents) flaws and all. You never pressure me to be anything other than myself. And you make me want to be the best version of myself. I’m honored to accept your hand in marriage. I love you more than a caption could express but I’m ecstatic to start a family and life with you. I love you forever my baby. My partner. Here’s to our future!!!!”
But by September 2020, news broke that the pair had parted ways. “It was a tough decision, but Demi and Max have decided to go their separate ways to focus on their respective careers,” a source told People. Interestingly, the reports of the split came shortly after Demi admitted that quarantining with Max during the COVID-19 pandemic had “accelerated” their relationship.
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The following month, Demi released a telling breakup song called “Still Have Me,” which featured lyrics like, “Everything around me shattered / All the highs are now just lows / But it doesn’t even matter / ’Cause I’d rather be alone.”
Meanwhile, Max hit out at Demi and accused her of using him in a now-viral Instagram Live. “I was in love. The whole world should freakin’ know it. I thought I found the real deal, now I found out that I was used,” he said. “But I hope the song is number one, because you know what, if that’s what someone wants in the material world, here you go, you have it. I hope this makes you happy. Enjoy. You just lost someone who loved you fully, completely, infinitely, for everything.”
In her 2021 docuseries, Demi opened up about the split. “I think I rushed into something that I thought was what I was supposed to do,” she admitted. “I realized as time went on that I didn’t actually know the person that I was engaged to. We were only together four or five months. And honestly, it was false advertising. The hardest part of the breakup was mourning the person that I thought he was. But I’m not the only one who felt fooled. I mean, I was just as shocked as the rest of the world at some of the things that were said and done.”
6. Literally weeks after they met in 2009, Lamar Odom proposed to Khloé Kardashian. And nine days after that, they tied the knot!
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At the time, a source told People, “It may seem like it’s a quickie wedding to everyone else, but Khloé knows what she wants. She and Lamar started talking about getting married really soon after they met. They knew this was it, and they’re just having fun with this whirlwind.”
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Things were great between the pair for a while. They even documented their life together on their own reality series called Khloé & Lamar. However, Khloé ended up filing for divorce from Lamar in 2013 after their relationship was repeatedly dogged by rumors of his infidelity and speculation about his misuse of drugs and alcohol.
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Khloé temporarily paused the divorce proceedings to oversee Lamar’s medical care after he almost died from a drug overdose in 2015 — and she remained by his side throughout his recovery. While it briefly seemed like the pair were set to rekindle things, Khloé ended up filing for divorce again in 2016 when the ex-basketball player was seen drinking alcohol just months after he left the hospital.
Khloé and Lamar ended up reuniting in her family’s Hulu series The Kardashians earlier this year. After the meeting, she shared in a heartbreaking TikTok comment, “Right person– wrong time…This meeting was hard for us both.”
7. Another couple that got married within weeks of dating was Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon, who tied the knot in 2008. Mariah repeatedly gushed about her and Nick’s romance, noting that she felt they were “soulmates” and that she’d “never felt a love like this was in the cards” for her. She later explained why she and Nick had kept things quiet ahead of their whirlwind wedding, telling Elle magazine, “We didn’t want to give people a chance to be like, ‘What are you doing? What are you talking about? This is so quick … Are you sure?’”
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Fast forward to 2014 — four years after they welcomed their twins, Monroe and Moroccan — and Mariah and Nick’s marriage was reportedly on the rocks, with a source claiming that it had “been bad for a while.” In 2016, things got messy between the exes as their divorce played out, with reports claiming that they argued over their property and custody of their twins. One source memorably claimed that Mariah spent “five hours straight” on the phone with her lawyers discussing the divorce, which resulted in her being three hours late to a performance at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting.
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8. Just four months after they started dating, Katy Perry and Russell Brand announced that they were engaged in January 2010. By October, they’d tied the knot — but roughly a year later, the pair called it quits, with Russell filing to end their marriage.
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At the time, Russell said that he had decided to end things with Katy because they were in different places in life. For context, she was 25 and he was 35. “She’s young, successful and dedicated…[The reality is] you can’t fully understand it until you do it. I was really into the idea of marriage and having children,” he told Howard Stern.
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Katy later revealed that Russell had ended their marriage via text message right before one of her concerts. “Let’s just say I haven’t heard from him since he texted me saying he was divorcing me December 31, 2011,” she told Vogue in 2013.
Both Katy and Russell later hinted that her widespread fame contributed to his decision to end their relationship, and Katy admitted separately that she was so heartbroken over the divorce that she contemplated suicide.
9. In January 2022, Kanye “Ye” West kicked off the year by hard-launching his relationship with Julia Fox — all while he was still begging to reunite with his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. Julia famously gushed about her “instant connection” with Ye, even admitting that she felt she was “surrendering” to him after a few weeks.
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But by the following month, Julia and Ye had called it quits. While she initially maintained in the aftermath of the split that dating Ye was “the best thing that could have happened” to her, the mom-of-one later said that dealing with him was “unsustainable” and felt like having “two babies.”
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Meanwhile, at the end of 2022, Julia opened up about how dating Ye negatively impacted her acting career. “After the big relationship, I definitely noticed a shift in the acting way,” she said. “I’m not getting as many offers as I was before, weirdly. There’s been a lot of weird drawbacks with reaching that level of notoriety.”
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10. In 2023, Taylor Swift and Matty Healy’s whirlwind relationship caused a huge stir. While the pair have known each other for years, they were linked publicly in May, just weeks after she split from her long-term partner, Joe Alwyn.
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The new relationship sparked backlash given Matty’s history of problematic behavior, which included him casually sharing that he masturbates to Black women being “brutalized.” (He said this publicly on a podcast just months before he and Taylor got together.)
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Matty’s controversies seemingly didn’t put Taylor off, and the pair remained a public item for about a month. But at the start of June, news broke that the couple had parted ways.
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The following year, Taylor appeared to detail their relationship across her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. Meanwhile, just a few months ago, fans speculated that Matty had made a subtle jab at Taylor when he referred to himself as a “poet” during his headlining performance at Glastonbury festival.
What’s more, Matty’s mom, Denise Welch, made an unfiltered comment about Taylor during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live back in July. When asked to share her thoughts on Taylor writing “a whole album” about Matty, Denise said, “Not being her mother-in-law is a role that I’m glad that I lost,” before adding, “It was just, you know, it was tricky. Listen, you’re not allowed to say anything, and then she writes a whole album about it. But Matty has taken it all in completely good grace.”
11. While it now seems like the pair might be reconciling things, Blac Chyna and Rob Kardashian’s whirlwind relationship was incredibly tumultuous back in 2016. The couple were romantically linked, engaged, and expecting a baby within a year — but it was later revealed that just a month after their daughter was born, they got into a physical altercation. They parted ways in 2017, with Rob memorably coming under fire after leaking explicit nude photos of Chyna (who now goes by her birth name, Angela White) and accusing her of infidelity.
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Angela was granted a restraining order against Rob, who was accused by her attorney of violating California’s law on the nonconsensual sharing of sexual images.
In 2022, Angela got embroiled in a legal battle against the Kardashian family, whom she accused of “killing” her and Rob’s past reality series. She sought $100 million in damages, and the Kardashians eventually won the case.
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Ahead of the legal battle, Angela accused Rob of giving her no support when it came to raising their daughter, Dream. “Yesterday I had to give up 3 of my cars …my reasons… morals, beliefs, being a single mother, no support I’m a MAMA,” she tweeted. Rob quickly entered the conversation, commenting under an Instagram post, “I pay 37k a year for my daughter’s school. I handle every single medical expense. I pay for all her extracurricular activities. I have my daughter from Tuesday-Saturday. Why would i pay child support lol.”
That said, Angela and Rob have recently hinted at a romantic reunion. She recently described him as her “person” while revealing that they’re “healing” and “going with the flow.” Who knows!
Can you think of any other whirlwind relationships that ended badly? Let us know in the comments.
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