Bad news for someone as emotionally invested in Katie Holmes’ happiness as I am: It sure looks like the actress and her chef boyfriend, Emilio Vitolo Jr., are headed for splitsville.
They haven’t broken up—yet. As Page Six put it, the pair’s eight-month-long romance is “fizzling out.” An “insider” told OK! that things were moving “very fast,” and the couple has agreed to “pump the brakes,” on the relationship.
And: Daily Mail paparazzi spotted Holmes “buying flowers solo,” which both sounds like a really lovely way to spend an afternoon and irrefutable proof that she’s single.
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It wasn’t always this way. The 41-year-old actress met Vitolo, 33, last September. He was fresh off of a breakup with his fashion designer fiancée, whom he dumped through a text message. Despite this, a source told Us Weekly that Holmes found Vitolo to be “a stable guy in her life.”
They were photographed all over downtown Manhattan eating al fresco, Holmes wearing amazing coats throughout the entire affair. She was, reportedly, “absolutely head over heels in love with Emilio.”
Vitolo described Holmes as “The most amazing, kindest, beautiful person,” in an Instagram post honoring her birthday in December. “Every time I see your face it makes me smile,” he wrote.
Very cute stuff. But now things appear to have cooled. Holmes was once dubbed the “queen of public makeouts” due to her Dolce Vita-esque tendency to publicly smooch Vitolo at every opportunity. But the world has reopened, and like all of us Holmes is preparing to get back to the office. She’s focused on a movie shoot, Page Six reported, and raising her daughter Suri Cruise. (Suri just turned 15 and happens to be her mother’s total double.)
So Katie Holmes’ pandemic bae may not be The One. Is yours? The famous couple’s trajectory closely matches that of plebeian coronavirus romances: meeting during quarantine, getting close quickly, and passionately expressing their new love online.
As the horniest among us prepare for the “whoring ’20s,” “shot girl summer,” or whatever you want to describe that impending bacchanalian season, many are rethinking the romances they got in for convenience sake.
“When we talk about relationships that began during the pandemic, it’s sort of like how there were those grabs for any brand of toilet paper or hand sanitizer last spring,” relationship expert Heather Dugan told The Daily Beast. “We were filling a different need, but the attitude was, ‘anything is better than nothing.’ We have since found out that’s horrifically untrue.”
Pandemic partners were helpful to curb loneliness when our lives consisted solely of Zoom birthdays and virtual Netflix-watching “parties.” Pods felt like an ethical way to find some connection during the era of social distancing.
“But if you made your bubble just the two of you, that tiny little bubble is going to run out of oxygen eventually,” Dugan warned. “It doesn’t matter how witty the banter after a while—if your perspective is that narrow, [a partner’s] perceived defects will loom larger and larger.”
Many of us can attend (small) gatherings again. We can meet new people, albeit awkwardly and hesitantly.
“That means we can return to being selective,” Dugan said. “There’s a lot more available. We can do things with other people and the world’s a little bigger. If you filled your [quarantine] life with the idea of the first available person, you don’t have to succumb to them anymore.”
People who began dating during the pandemic might not know what their partner’s “old lives” looked like. A post-vaccine return to that daily grind could prove jarring, said Mary Beth Harvey, a co-founder and chief wellness officer of the networking app Friended.
“It is an intimate thing to be alone with someone for such a long period of time,” Harvey explained. “You’re going to go back out and show them your friends, coworkers, and show them a whole different side to yourself. There might be some parts of that life they like, and some parts they don’t like as much.”
Even if that person is Katie Holmes. At least she’ll always have New York—and her fabulous coats.
