Might 2025 be the year of the celebrity family estrangement? There’s the one at the heart of the Beckham family — the one which sees Victoria and David’s eldest son, Brooklyn, continue to forsake their highly Instagrammable bosom for the (equally Instagrammable) bosom of his wife, Nicola.
There’s the one keeping Thomas Markle from his daughter, Meghan Sussex — which took another, sad, twist earlier this month, when Thomas had a leg amputated, and may or may not have received an email from his daughter, re: his health. To top it all, on Saturday, Holly Ramsay, daughter of Gordon and Tana, married Olympian Adam Peaty in a beautiful, chilly ceremony at Bath Abbey — to which the groom’s mother was not invited.
Brooklyn Beckham with his wife Nicola Peltz Beckham in December 2024
DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGES FOR EXPERIENCE ABU DHABI
Most of Peaty’s family appear to have been excluded: only his sister Bethany was present; she served as a bridesmaid, dressed (really rather well) in a red frock designed by, oh! Will you look at that! Family friend Victoria Beckham! Who was also there, in an ivy-green concoction of her own making. Beckham dressed Tana Ramsay, too, and possibly the bride, that has yet TBC. Honestly, you’d have thought the whole thing quite perfect — everything and everyone was so good-looking, radiant, and expensive! — if it hadn’t been for Peaty’s mother, Caroline, his 73-year-old Great Aunt Janet and his Aunt Louise leaking like sieves to the press. Caroline told the Daily Mail she was “beside herself” at not being invited, and that: “I’m not going to be hurt like this again.” She’d even thought about crashing the wedding, she said, but her husband Mark convinced her not to, which — given that five security guards patrolled the abbey’s doors — is probably for the best. An unseemly interlude was avoided.
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Meanwhile, Great Aunt Janet said: “I can’t believe he’s done this to his mother who’s done so much for him from an early age. To be treated like this is not kind.” As for Aunt Louise … just as Adam Peaty teetered on the brink of walking up the aisle to claim his love, she sent her nephew a message, which amounts to — well. Less a “text”, more a curse. “I hope you never suffer the depth of pain you have put your mother through and despite it all she loves you still. Shame on you both. Shame. Remember on this, your happiest day, and on each anniversary of your happiest day, that you hurt your mum so deeply her soul screams.’”
We know this, because it was faithfully reproduced in the Mail, which rather suggests Aunt Louise sent it to them, too. The overarching narrative — driven by the Peaty family — is that they’re too declassé and council house for the upmarket Ramsays’ liking, a belief which sprouted circa the engagement bash thrown in December 2024, to which, wider members of the Peaty clan were not invited, then metastasized when Caroline was not asked to Holly Ramsay’s splashy Soho Farmhouse hen do last month (although, as a friend says: “Mother-in-laws at hen dos are gross, I don’t care who you are.”).
So yes — I think it’s reasonable to call 2025 the year of the Celebrity Family Estrangement. Which is desperately sad, not nearly so fun as 2024’s year of the Nepo Baby, and infinitely more complicated and hurtful than the broad strokes and two-side tribalism a newspaper report will allow. But might it also be symptomatic of a greater cultural vibe shift?
“It sometimes feels like every other one of my friends is estranged from some aspect of their family,” a late-thirty-something friend tells me. “It’s the millennial disease.”
“Seriously?” I ask. First I’ve heard of it.
“Oh, someone’s always pulling me aside after reformer Pilates so they can tell me they’ve gone LC with a parent.”
Ah, so — I didn’t know either but: LC stands for “low contact”, the mindful and deliberate reduction in the time and frequency with which you interact with a parent. A more gentle alternative to NC (no contact), it’s about the “implementation of meaningful boundaries”; the “destigmatising” of the “partially severed tie”; it is furthermore a “useful tool” in the managing of “toxic, narcissistic parents” inclined towards “gaslighting”.
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If that sounds like lazy, empty, pseudo-therapeutic baloney to you — that, my millennial mate tells me, is precisely the problem.
“It’s all wrapped up in how seriously my generation takes itself and its Mental Health. All the Instagram therapy, Live Your Truth stuff; how we must all be Main Characters, and everyone needs to honour that, and if they don’t, they’re trying to ‘dim our light’…”
An inflexible, self-centring, victim-inclined perspective, which might, I imagine, be compounded by the contemporary, spiralling inability to tolerate anyone else’s political and/or ideological stance —then perhaps more, again, by the heavily edited and curated notion of what family should mean, how it should look, also perpetuated on social media — which could leave some wondering why theirs is failing to live up, then, rejecting it.
Ah, but then again — maybe this is all just new, therapy-framed thoughts, for a very old story. Family has always been messy, tensions have always simmered, wounds have always festered. A non-millennial friend once said to me, of her mother: “Everyone says, ‘She loves you, underneath it all!’ But I wish they wouldn’t. She doesn’t.” Maybe “LC” translates to earlier generations’ tight-lipped forbearance, our pass agg refusal to buy the right biscuits, or adhere to the dress code. There’s a reason all my exercise classes are running and fully booked right the way through the Christmas break; perhaps Gen X avoidance is the same thing as millennial estrangement.
It’s all a bit sad, and quite predictable. Is there anything we can learn from it? Anything at all? Perhaps, just that, if you’re not invited to the wedding, don’t choose to air your dirty laundry in public. Nothing good comes of it.