We'll take it.
While we don't know what sort of decision-making process led up to the sudden-for-us news Monday that Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber were splitting up after 11 years together, the grace with which they announced their breakup made us realize something.
Perhaps we don't want to know what happened. We already had one gripping case of he-said, she-said to contend with yesterday, after all.
But hasn't that been the situation every day? If the "Summer of Splits" was last year, 2016 has been the year of the Spring of Suspicion, the May of Maybe Johnny Depp Is a Jerk, the Summer of Taylor Swift's Discontent and the Fall of Brangelina. All playing out against the most noxious political climate that seasoned experts care to remember (as well as the rest of the non-entertainment world's ills, which may be the reason why we can't get enough Brangelina updates).
It's not as though Schreiber and Watts, who have two children together, were contractually obligated to tell the media anything, let alone release a statement. Since they weren't married there was no gotcha divorce filing waiting to be discovered at the courthouse, so conceivably they could have gone right along for some time without people being the wiser.
They didn't attend the Emmys together, but they were holding hands on the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival in early September, so they weren't high on the list of ones to watch (for unfortunate reasons). Work keeps actors apart, etc.
But just the same, a tip of the hat to the longtime couple turned exes devoted to keeping things civil—because we needed that.
After Johnny Depp's frailties—some alleged, some suspected, all magnified—were splayed all over court documents for the world to read (as is that world's right with regard to public documents, however unpalatable), the legal end of his marriage to Amber Heard, that settlement we suspected was coming, couldn't come fast enough.
But even their mutual admission that theirs was an "intensely passionate and at times volatile" relationship and Depp's agreement to give Heard's pet charities $7 million didn't stop the animosity: Heard objected to the way Depp was doling out the funds. And so it goes.
And the drama surrounding their breakup was made quantifiably nastier by the commentary, most of it slamming Heard, on social media—which often serves to make everything nastier, even pleasant things like date nights and family photos and fashion shows.
There's the underlying debate that Heard and Depp's dirty laundry "wasn't anybody's business." And that could be true, in a humanitarian, we-should-practice-empathy-always sense, but these weren't two anonymous souls accidentally caught up in an Internet firestorm. Depp has made millions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars, thanks to the ongoing interest in what he does in front of a camera. There's really no such thing anymore as there being no collective interest in what the most famous, and richest, of actors are doing off-camera.
The two existences, though one can carry on as the other crumbles, are destined to collide.
So there we were, waiting to see how the Johnny-Amber thing would pan out, when Taylor Swift rebounded with a vengeance, got vicariously sucked into her ex's Twitter harangue, was "exposed" as being perhaps not entirely truthful in retrospect about her role in the construction of Kanye West's "Famous" and then ended up single again by summer's end.
Wow, sounds very high school when you put it that way.
But while Swift has stayed on the high road throughout, only bothering to pull over in response to Kim Kardashian's "Famous" reveal (which Kim has since explained was not intended to shade Taylor in any way), she was really put through the wringer this year, her integrity when it came to relationships and music called into question.
Maybe some sort of popular-girl backlash had been building in the background, but considering two years ago there was nothing more exciting in pop culture (for at least a couple days) than Swift releasing 1989, it was disappointing to see where the Internet was willing to go with someone who, on every other day, seemed to be held in such high esteem.
Meanwhile, similar things can be said about others whose "universally beloved" status has since been tempered by the emergence of Twitter critics (and downright Twitter hate). Ellen DeGeneres was accused of tweeting a racist meme (it wasn't), Leslie Jones was attacked on Twitter with hateful, racist remarks and her website was hacked, and Justin Timberlake was slammed for cultural appropriation (valid convo, unwitting target) when he tried to compliment Jesse Williams' eye-opening speech at the BET Awards.
No one is safe from the danger of pissing someone else off, either with an opinion or, in most cases, like Jones' (or even Taylor Swift's), just by going about her business.
And then, to join all the other confusion that exists in this world, Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt on Sept. 19.
Happy pumpkin spice season, everybody.
Now, neither Jolie nor Pitt has officially and/or publicly accused the other of anything, but Jolie requesting full physical custody of their six kids was a trigger warning, to say the least, of potentially disturbing topics to come.
And sure enough, while both actors have remained respectfully terse in the statement department, Pitt's every move as a parent is now under scrutiny. Eight days in, and the other most famous movie star in the world has lost his luster too.
Whether that's fair or not, or if it was Jolie's intention or not, is moot in the eyes of 2016, which has turned into a real rascal of a year. Sources agree that Pitt and Jolie's No. 1 concern is their kids' well-being, which makes perfect sense—but how quickly (at least to the rest of us) one of the great Hollywood love affairs of this generation devolved into just another sad split, with forecasters predicting a 50 percent chance of messiness.
So that's why we'll take our celebrity civility where we can get it. Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts may have taken a circuitous and rocky road to get to this point, but perhaps—maybe, just maybe—the buck will stop here.