It's OK to feel sad about the end of Brangelina – they offered millennials an aspirational happy normality our parents never did

So many reactions to the news of their divorce come back to 'If they can’t do it, no one can'. Marriage is something that doesn’t get much visibility these days, and for many younger people it’s a lofty illusion

(Getty)

In the realm of celebrity icons, 2016 has been particularly vicious – David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, all gone too soon – and now the marriage of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But does the end of Brangelina deserve the same public outpouring of grief as the death of a cultural legend?

The short answer is: it depends. And before you succumb to the temptation to scorn and dismiss the many people professing their sadness, it’s worth thinking about the couple and what they meant to a generation of people across the world.

Some of us will remember the days of ‘Team Aniston’ and ‘Team Jolie’ back in 2004 – a widespread tongue-in-cheek pop culture moment which many took probably more seriously than they should have. What was the prize up for grabs in the competition between those two teams? The love of Brad Pitt, of course. It’s a testament to how far we’ve come that pitting two women against each other over a man (there was a T-shirt range! A T-shirt range!) these days is basically unthinkable. Nevertheless, Jolie became a figure of contempt for many, and her budding relationship with Pitt was subjected to an amount of scrutiny that feels commonplace now, but was unprecedented at the time. Still, they got through it.

Over the years, the two developed their public profiles both individually and as a couple. Each took challenging roles in the film industry. Equally, their humanitarian work – and not just as a one-off showpiece but as committed, ongoing and in-depth –separated them from the average self-indulgent Hollywood couple posing for photos on a white sand beach. Brand Brangelina really meant something.

When in 2013 Jolie battled against cancer, she became a voice for many women who, like her, had undergone a double mastectomy – and when she spoke about her experience of having her ovaries removed last year due to the presence of the BRCA1 cancer gene, she helped to facilitate long-overdue conversations about women’s health. Regardless of your thoughts on celebrity culture, and whether or not discussions like these should fall to celebrities to encourage, her openness had a positive and lasting effect. This “realness” about mortality and motherhood endeared the nation – indeed, the world – to Jolie. Her and Pitt’s strength as a couple in the face of such difficult times spoke to something deep within us, and was reassuring.

Which is perhaps why so many reactions to the news of their divorce come back to “If they can’t do it, no one can”. Marriage is something that doesn’t get much visibility these days, and for many younger people it’s a lofty illusion which they never even saw demonstrated by their parents. Despite being astronomically wealthy and living thousands of miles away from the average Brit, Brangelina’s relationship was perhaps the most aspirational of all – no tantrums, no screaming matches, no huge betrayals, just getting on with life, even with the stresses and strains of illness, operations and six children to boot.

Just as David Bowie’s creative output symbolised the possibilities of imagination, Brad and Angelina symbolised the possibility of a happy normality, or at least a version of it. And now, Brangelina is no more. If that’s not a reason to post a sad emoji, I don’t know what is.