“Noooo,” I screamed at 8am, eyes fixed on my phone. My wife ran into the room, socks skidding across the floorboards, aware enough by my tone that something bad had happened – maybe a death. When I announced the news, her face dropped. “What?!” she said, mouth agog, not quite believing it. I thrust the screen in her direction so she could see the headlines. Chrishell Stause, formerly of , and the Australian musician G-Flip had broken up. They’d been together for nearly five years. There wasn’t a clear explanation.
I’m not the only queer person to have reacted in this admittedly quite outsized way about two people I have never met and do not know. For days afterwards, my WhatsApp and Instagram DMs were alight with variations of “I’m devastated” as well as endless dissections about what might have happened. Chrishell had posted a tearful video on Instagram. She said that “G and I are no longer together” and that she doesn’t have “all the information and the reasons”. She then said that she feels like “a failure” and that she has to “heal and figure this out”. Watching it, I felt like been broken up with. I sent screenshots to a best friend, our messages frantic and littered in typos.
To understand the parasocial relationship that plenty of queer people have with Chrishell and G Flip, it’s probably best to rewind a little. The pair got together in early 2022 after meeting at a Halloween party. Until then, Chrishell had only ever been in straight relationships, the most public of which hadn’t ended well. Her ex-husband Justin Hartley had allegedly notified her of their impending divorce via text message 45 minutes before news broke. Her next partner, co-star Jason Oppenheim, famously had no intentions of settling down. And then along came G Flip, who was different. Their relationship was open-hearted from the off, and looked easy in that way good relationships do. “This is the perfect example of a relationship that a few years ago I wouldn’t have thought was possible,” Chrishell gushed to Australia in 2023.
But the backlash to Chrishell’s coming out was swift. “It was an unbelievable flood of trolling,” Chrishell told Australia. “Every day I’m seeing, like, three positive comments and then hundreds of puke emojis and midlife crisis comments.” The undertones (and in many cases, overtones) were clear: homophobic audiences were shocked that this woman might not choose to date a man. It must be a “phase”, they hypothesised, or, worse, a misdirected response to years of “bad luck” with men. It’s a reaction that plenty of queer people, particularly sapphics, are deeply familiar with: the inference that your relationship isn’t valid, or that it’s just a stop-gap along the way.
But the longer their relationship went on, the clearer it became that this was the real deal. On , Chrishell patiently corrected the constant misgendering of G Flip and was steadfast in saying that she’d “finally” found her “person”. While the trolling didn’t relent, the queer community welcomed the power couple with open arms, as if to say: they might not understand, but we do. In 2023, G Flip released “Be Your Man”, a song about Chrishell: “I know how you think, and what you like, and what your body needs… I’m not what you planned, but I’ll be your man.” It came as no surprise when the pair wed in Las Vegas in 2022, with a vow renewal ceremony every year afterwards. They spoke publicly about actively trying to start a family, and the struggles around IVF.
Break-ups are often sad – even when they’re between people you don’t know personally – though I don’t actually think that’s the reason so many queer people feel oddly stricken by this one in particular. Chrishell and G Flip’s relationship felt emblematic of queer success; a middle finger to the heterosexual scripts foisted upon us, and an example of how your life may not look like what you were told it should, but that it’ll be infinitely better for it. Their break-up doesn’t take away from that, and in many ways only compounds the idea of embracing life with authenticity, but it’s still frustrating to see homophobes gleefully sink their teeth into the narrative. “My jaw remains in place,” read comments beneath recent news stories, many of them questioning whether Chrishell will go “back to men”. Meanwhile tabloids are quick to report that the pair’s marriage was never legally binding, like a sort of moment relating to the validity of their union.
It’s ultimately no one’s business why Chrishell and G Flip broke up (though of course that won’t stop me from tirelessly discussing “clues” within the privacy of my own cocktail gatherings). And break-ups always end up being a good thing, in the end, regardless of how they feel in the moment. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that we now have one less queer power couple, nor does it detract from the discomfort that comes from seeing naysayers sling ignorance towards a relationship that looks like your own. “You have been so supportive and so loving,” said Chrishell in her break-up video, her voice cracking. “Maybe you can still do that, but it would have to be separately.”
“I’m sure, just like always, with time, you get the lessons you’re meant to get,” she continued. “And I know that’s going to happen, and I’m going to heal. And everything’s going to be fine.”
