With the whole world watching, celebrity marriages — and breakups — can't be easy.
From all that we've observed, here are some of the reasons why Giada De Laurentiis got divorced.
"You have gone through a tough time recently, a public divorce…
oh, just start out, right out, not even like 'nice to see you Giada'
When De Laurentiis met
her then-future husband Todd Thompson, she was a broke anthropology major at UCLA with
a very different career track in front of her, according to Redbook. At the time,
Thompson, who is close to seven years older than De Laurentiis, was already well into his career as
a fashion designer, while De Laurentiis didn't yet realize that cooking was her true calling.
But she figured it out soon enough, and headed to Paris to study at the famed cooking school,
Le Cordon Bleu, before returning to Los Angeles to begin her culinary career. After that,
it took until 2002 for De Laurentiis to get her first break on television.
By the time De Laurentiis and Thompson finally tied the knot in 2003, the couple had already
been together for well over a decade and had weathered such stressors as college exams,
a long-distance situation, career uncertainty, and the sudden success of one spouse.
Having met her husband while still so young and well before her star had risen
may have worked against De Laurentiis' chances of having a lifelong marriage.
Research has shown that relationship success can often be predicted based on how similar
in background the partners are, according to one doctor who told Psychology Today,
"Couples with more similar attitudes, values, and backgrounds tend to experience more lasting
satisfaction, companionship, intimacy, and love and are less likely to break up."
Apparently, De Laurentiis and Thompson didn't have that going in their favor.
De Laurentiis, who was born in Italy, didn't immigrate to the U.S. until she was 7 years
old. Thompson hails from the Midwest — his Michigan-based family is not at all accustomed to
the Hollywood lifestyle, whereas De Laurentiis is a member of the Hollywood De Laurentiis dynasty,
of which De Laurentiis' grandfather was the patriarch, according to Redbook.
And when De Laurentiis and Thompson met, Thompson not only knew nothing about cooking,
he also knew nothing about Italian food. De Laurentiis admitted in 2011,
"He took a lot of flak from my family. When he would come to
my grandfather's house to eat dinner, my grandfather would say to me in Italian,
'Who is this person butchering his pasta by cutting it with a fork and knife?'"
De Laurentiis and Thompson, who were married in 2003, decided to divorce in December 2014.
"And so I was trying to figure out,
okay what does this mean now? Because we're identified a lot of times by being married."
According to People magazine, the couple had separated in July 2014,
just one month after De Laurentiis opened her very first restaurant, GIADA.
The intense demands that go with opening her own restaurant could have contributed to the marriage
reaching its breaking point. But add to that the fact that the restaurant was located in Las Vegas,
Nevada — at least a four-hour drive from where the couple made their home in Los Angeles — and
you have a set-up for a marital blow-up. According to Psychology Today, more than half of all people
perceive long-distance relationships as fundamentally less happy and satisfying.
In an analysis of why it is that the husbands of so many uber-successful wives tend to
"opt out" of their own careers, sacrificing their personal ambition for that of their wives,
The Atlantic declared that "power couples are a rarity."
Shortly after the two announced their wedding, Thompson began
spending more and more time supporting De Laurentiis' career, rather than his own.
Starting in 2004 and until the couple's divorce, the designer appeared frequently
on his wife's television shows. De Laurentiis acknowledged in her 2011 interview with Redbook,
"I think it can be hard for any man to sometimes be upstaged by his wife."
But in the case of De Laurentiis and Thompson, the upstaging wasn't just a sometimes occurrence, but
the actual reality of everyday life for the couple — and it couldn't have helped that De Laurentiis
made it all look so easy. As the television star told Food & Wine in a 2016 interview,
she wasn't even "looking to get into TV." Basically, she was just plucked from
obscurity thanks to a story someone else wrote about her and her passion for Italian cooking.
According to Psychology Today, "detachment from work appears to
be critical to a happy relationship." We can't begin to guess whether and to
what extent De Laurentiis was present at home when she wasn't working during the
11 years of her marriage. But it's easy to wonder how she found time to be home at all.
Having made her television debut in 2003, De Laurentiis wrote a companion cookbook to go
with the series, which was published in 2005. Two more books followed, as did a new television show,
and stints as a mentor on Food Network Star and as a correspondent for the Today show. And that's
all before De Laurentiis became a mom, which hardly slowed the celebrity chef down at all.
In 2010, when Jade Thompson was still a toddler,
De Laurentiis launched another cooking series with a companion cookbook and entered into a
merchandising partnership with Target. Anyone with De Laurentiis' extensive — and incredibly
impressive — work commitments might have trouble being present, both literally and metaphorically.
De Laurentiis has been the subject of tabloid fodder on
numerous occasions with regard to alleged marital infidelity.
"Is this whiskey?"
In 2011, she was rumored to have been romantically involved with Matt Lauer,
who was then anchoring the Today show, on which De Laurentiis has been a frequent guest.
The Lauer rumor popped back up in 2013, but not before De Laurentiis
was rumored to have hooked up with bad-boy pop star John Mayer, according to US Weekly.
Whether true or totally fabricated, these rumors likely took their toll on De Laurentiis' marriage,
possibly contributing to her divorce. In fact, De Laurentiis confirmed as much to Us
Weekly when she revealed that her then-husband Todd was embarrassed by the Mayer-related rumors.
It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that hurtful gossip intended to damage one
partner in a relationship will likely damage both partners, not to mention the relationship itself.
De Laurentiis and her friend and fellow celebrity chef, Bobby Flay, aren't an item,
but there are tons of reasons why people think they are. The pair, who've been friends for almost
as long as De Laurentiis was married to Thompson, seem to enjoy teasing the press — consider such
antics as entertaining the claims of gossip columnists that, like teenage sweethearts,
the duo carved their initials into some secret spot in New York City. And during the pandemic,
while many of the rest of us were holed up in our homes, Flay and De Laurentiis were working
on a new show called Bobby and Giada in Italy, which was released in 2021 on Discovery Plus.
Still, regardless of what is true or what could become true,
such a close relationship between two attractive adults who work together could have put a strain
on either or both of their marriages. As one psychiatrist told Psychology Today,
a situation like this can create instability in the primary relationships of the "work spouses,"
as colleagues who form a special and sometimes questionable bond are sometimes called.
Although the demise of the marriage has been characterized as "amicable" by De Laurentiis
herself, the fact remains that after a separation of less than six months,
Thompson pulled the plug on the whole thing by filing for divorce,
citing irreconcilable differences, according to E! News. De Laurentiis and her current boyfriend,
Shane Farley, met in 2013 — while De Laurentiis and Thompson were still married,
and while Farley was still married to his former wife, according to Page Six.
Still, De Laurentiis has always maintained that she and Farley didn't start dating until
several months after her divorce from Thompson was finalized. Specifically,
her rep told Page Six that the relationship began in August 2015. However, in 2018, De Laurentiis
told People magazine that after her divorce, she, quote, "spent about a year and a half alone,
not dating, just figuring things out," and that she reconnected with Farley only after that.
That would have put the start of De Laurentiis' relationship with Farley at around October 2016.
Whether the rumors are true or not,
the inconsistencies in narrative are enough to raise eyebrows — as well as the question of
whether De Laurentiis and Farley became involved before De Laurentiis and Thompson separated.
In a 2011 interview with Redbook, De Laurentiis confirmed that she's
accepted and grown comfortable with being "cooking's sex symbol." Additionally,
in a 2014 interview with Elle, De Laurentiis went so far as to say that
she'd come to rely on her femininity in order to distinguish herself as a chef. She stated,
"You have to learn how to play the game. It's not a bad thing! Everybody plays it.
You just have to learn which moves to make, and you have to be willing to walk away."
It's possible, however, that De Laurentiis' reliance on her feminine wiles may have put
a strain on her relationship with Thompson. For one thing, it's not a stretch to imagine
that playing the so-called "game" could have played a role in inspiring gossip columnists
to speculate on the nature of De Laurentiis' friendships with Matt Lauer and Bobby Flay,
or to imagine that she actually did spend a torrid night with John Mayer at a New York City hotel.
And whether and to what extent the rumors of infidelity can be traced to De Laurentiis' sex
symbol status, the fact remains that couples who fall into traditional gender roles such as this,
tend to be less satisfied in their marriages than those who adopt more androgynous roles,
according to Psychology Today.
Not everyone's a fan of De Laurentiis, and lately, there have been questions
about whether she actually may not be all that "nice." It's hard to forget the time she talked
down to Nicole Kidman on The Ellen Show. And De Laurentiis made it abundantly clear that if you
ever go to her restaurant, she does not want you to touch her — although she's been working
her way through the inevitable but icky hugs and handshakes, according to the New York Daily News.
Then there was the rather ungrateful remark De Laurentiis made to Parade in 2013,
a year before her marriage unraveled. When asked if she likes breakfast in bed,
her response was to diss her then-husband Thompson for bringing her his, quote, "scramble surprise,"
which she described in rather unflattering terms and which she said finds "hard to eat" in bed.
But what does being nice have to do with why De Laurentiis got divorced?
Because being nice matters, according to Psychology Today. Being "pleasing,
agreeable, delightful, [and] kind" is fundamental to all personal relationships.
De Laurentiis and Thompson got married when De Laurentiis was 33, after having been together for
more than a decade. However, they didn't start a family for another four years, according to
People magazine, and even then, it wasn't exactly the couple's "plan." She told Redbook in 2011,
"Todd and I talked about kids and decided we were okay not having them."
In fact, upon learning she was pregnant,
De Laurentiis confessed to being "very afraid" — and so was Thompson. At the time, she wondered,
"What would happen to this life we had created,
where we'd just take off for Santa Barbara for the weekend?"
Not surprisingly, De Laurentiis found a way to make things work.
Her daughter Jade was born in 2008, and De Laurentiis is still going strong in her career.
Her marriage, however, not so much. Attorney Edward J. Jennings wrote on his website,
"An unintended pregnancy can wreak havoc on a marriage. Even the most stable of marriages
can suffer a rift or even experience divorce when a couple learns a child is on the way."
Although De Laurentiis and Thompson didn't divorce until 2015,
the rift may have been there for far longer.
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