If you spend time in the queer corners of TikTok, you may have seen references to the “lesbian breakup curse” or the “lesbian breakup apocalypse” in recent months. In fact, the growing trend has gotten so big that even mainstream publications have started calling it out.
So what’s going on?
Kendall Payne (@kendallxpayne) actually sums things up extremely well in a video tracing the popular couples who kicked off the so-called apocalypse, all breaking up at around the same time.
First, college basketball star Sedona Prince and Rylee LeGlue announced their split at the end of July in a since-deleted video. They had been dating for a year and a half and gained popularity largely due to — you guessed it — the height difference.
A public relationship makes for a public breakup, and it wasn’t long before accusations of cheating and poor treatment started flying, keeping the former couple in people’s minds as other dominoes started to fall in the sapphic world.
Alissa Carrington and Samantha Miani, who were mostly active on YouTube, called it quits after four years together, even deleting their channel in the aftermath. Early August also saw the end of TikTokers Avery Cyrus and Soph Mosca, and within two weeks, even JoJo Siwa had announced that her rekindled romance with first girlfriend Kylie Prew had fizzled out two months prior.
Many have pointed the finger at the drama surrounding Fletcher, her ex Shannon Beveridge, and Shannon’s new girlfriend, Becky. We traced that in more detail before, but the gist of it is that Fletcher recently released a new song talking about how hot Becky is, Shannon and Becky were vocally displeased, and fans started taking sides. With everything that happened, the question became: did this kick off some sort of curse?
Except if we’re going to loop Shannon into things, we have to go back to where she got her start — lesbian YouTube. Back when she was dating Cammie Scott, she was part of a wave of popular queer female YouTube couples who collaborated on videos that frequently gave way, way too much insight into personal lives. Very few of those prominent couples are still together now, but similar waves of breakups happened during that time period.
But while Shannon may be the link between these two similar realms, and Fletcher’s song may have been the most important messy queer drama at the start of all of this, with the two of them kind of bridging the gap between a lesbian YouTube apocalypse and a lesbian TikTok apocalypse, the reality of this “curse” is, of course, much more simple — the more visible queer couples exist, the more visible breakups we’ll see.
That said, if King Princess wants to keep writing songs about it, we’re not going to complain.
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