By Anne T. Donahue
Yesterday while minding my own business in a classroom setting (read: I was embarrassingly early and pretending I was consumed with very important emails to send), I saw the news break: Dave Grohl had fathered a child with a woman who was not his wife and released the statement via Instagram.
“I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage,” he began. “I plan to be a loving and supporting parent to her. I love my wife and my children and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness. We’re grateful for your consideration toward all the children involved, as we move forward together.”
In response, the internet has exploded, and particularly with tidal waves of disappointment. After all, Grohl has been married for 21 years to his wife (Jordyn Blum) and the two have three children together. Thus, it’s been easy to label Dave Grohl as a “family man” and/or the last beacon of hope for longstanding celebrity marriages. True, he and his wife are strangers to us, but as consumers of culture, pairing our own optimism with someone else’s palatable public persona is irresistible.
Which I get! When Amy Poehler and Will Arnett split up in 2014, I was devastated to the point of tweeting “love is dead” because, according to my outside perspective, it was. Did I know them? I fucking wish. But what I was actually mourning was the promise of “making it” amidst a chaotic and often terrible world. I mean, hello: if they couldn’t make it work, who could?
But also, who cares?
We, as persons with hearts and souls, want to see the best in people, which is why acknowledging the icons we put up on pedestals as human beings is devastating. A letdown on multiple levels. Not only does the narrative we’ve assigned (and over-romanticized) no longer apply, it may never have existed. The allegiance we were pledging may have all been for naught. Dave Grohl, for example, is not only an excellent musician, he was supposed to be a decent man. That title meant something! He wasn’t supposed to be like everybody else!
Ultimately, I don’t think our shock at Grohl’s extra-marital-whatever has anything to do with what he did. Frankly, the terms of his circumstances aren’t really any of our business (unless he turns out to be a predator, then that’s a conversation for another day), and we’re only talking about them because he told us. Long-term relationships and marriage are complicated and storied, and people and dynamics change over time. This is a fundamental truth that we’ve come to understand in 2024, and no one needs me to remind them of that. Separation, divorce, breaking up aren’t failures because they signal the necessity for change. Endings happen because some things just end.
However, Grohl and his celebrity counterparts aren’t supposed to change. He’d been through so much and come out the other side which signalled a sense of “knowing better.” He was the “after” photo following a long career that saw a lot of tragedy. He was supposed to uphold the belief that you can change and grow up, or that love conquers all, or that you can be Dave Grohl™ and a husband/father/genre veteran. We’d assigned meaning to his persona that wasn’t supposed to be disproven. Even though we all knew (and know) better.
Volumes have been written about the parasocial relationships we form with celebrities and the harm they inevitably bring. Yet we can’t seem to shake the one-sided connections we form and the expectations that go along with them because it’s comforting to believe the people we look up to are better than we are. Alas, they are not. And that’s not a bad thing: most of us would rather be thought of as three-dimensional or complicated or complex or, or, or. Most of us would shirk the notion of sainthood and tell strangers to stay out of our business if they began digging through it. Then again, most of us wouldn’t have posted an announcement ala Grohl, but here we are. Let’s just not be so disappointed when the next person we exalt reveals themselves as just some guy.
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