The year 2023 will forever be remembered as the year of Pinoy celebrity breakups – the demise of relationships between Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla, Kim Chiu and Xian Lim, Sarah Lahbati and Richard Gutierrez, Andrea Brillantes and Ricci Rivero, Cherry Pie Picache and Edu Manzano.

These power couplings uncoupling, putting an exclamation point to what could and should have been happily-ever-after romances, humanize these idols on whom we shower our collective love, support, time and hard-earned money. Whatever fame, fortune and god-like life they possess, this disconnection to the one they love make them one of us again.

We see that they're also mortals who bleed, get hurt, are consumed with anguish and anxiety, feel pain and loss. The tears fall without the camera and a director's instructions.

And exacerbating their afflictions are social media and netizens becoming their tormentors and torturers.

Do we learn something, anything, from all these goodbyes to romance and love? When forever is not enough, is love still worth it?

Common denominator

The common denominator in all these break-ups is that the reasons that led to the severance of the relationships have not been disclosed.

All that we have are assumptions and theories formulated by kibitzers and outsiders, armed with the most fertile of imaginations as they spin and weave the most intriguing speculations, involving, among them, infidelity, emotional and physical battery, jealousy, sexual preference and orientation, grooming and hygiene, authority figures, the use and mishandling of finances.

These and many more grounds are enumerated with ferocity on social media, even as the lips of all those involved remain sealed.

This act of civility, employing silence as the best defense since less talk equals less mistakes, is deemed a weakness by some and presumed as an admittance of guilt by the purveyors of loose talk.

Cryptic posts

But official statements, too, are often of no help. And cryptic posts are done by the lame.

No one believes that Bernardo authored her lengthy dramatic farewell. Padilla's goodbye, meanwhile, written in Filipino, only got bad press. To those in the know, what these two people presented to social media was written by ghostwriters and not them.

The official statements of Lim and Chiu were branded as "hypocritical" since the ex-lovers' individual take on the breakup had the common strain of wishing happiness for each other.

Lahbati's cryptic posts, on the other hand, bring more chaos than clarity, with the follow-up rebuttals from their parental figures adding more sizzle and fuel to the marital conflagration.

The act of deleting photos and videos, unfollowing the ex and even his or her friends is the ultimate signal that relationship is beyond repair and cannot be salvaged. No amount of pleas and prayers from fanatics and supporters can change the inevitable.

Ticking bomb

The number of years together, and – in the case of married couples — the promise to have and to hold, for richer and for poorer, till death do us part, and even the arrival and presence of kids, are all no guarantee that couples will stay together for good.

They have to do the work for the relationship to thrive and survive, and this commitment must not be attached to the loins but to the gut, with the right doses of passion from the heart and resolve and wisdom from the mind.

The reality is that all kinds of relationships have the capacity to hurt, and celebrities are not immune from the doom and gloom.

Saying goodbye to a romance, a marriage or a love manufactured and stamped as market-ready and for public consumption is a path not for the faint-hearted.

In the end, it is the un-couple who has the final, definitive say if what they had was all worth it.