Christie Brinkley is rethinking what happily ever after means. In a new interview, the 72-year-old said she still believes in soulmates, but no longer thinks they are meant to last forever in the romantic way she once imagined.
That view lands now because Brinkley is talking openly about love, age and her new memoir, Uptown Girl, while revisiting a life that has been shaped by four marriages and four divorces. On Fox & Friends, she discussed the memoir and the years behind it; in Social Life, she pushed the point further, saying she now sees soulmates as something that can change shape instead of disappear.
Brinkley put it plainly: she is still a believer in soulmates, but she does not know whether they last forever the way she once thought they would. She added that a soulmate can transform and remain a soulmate even when the bond is no longer the romantic one. That is a different idea from the one many readers grew up with, and it fits the long arc of her personal life.
She married Jean-François Allaux in 1975 when she was 21, and the marriage ended in 1981. She was later in a relationship with Olivier Chandon de Brailles, whom she met in 1982, before he died at 27 in 1983. Brinkley has said that his death was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of her life. She married Billy Joel in 1985 and divorced in 1994, then married Richard Taubman later that year before that marriage ended in 1995. Her fourth marriage, to Peter Cook, began in 1996 and ended in 2008.
The friction in her comments is not hard to hear. Brinkley still uses the language of soulmates, but she has moved away from the idea that one person must fill every chapter forever. Age, she said, has made her freer. She said she does what she wants when she wants to do it, knows what she likes, knows what she does not like, and no longer feels she has to put up with things she does not like.
That is the real shift in her story. Brinkley is not rejecting romance so much as narrowing the promise she is willing to attach to it. She says her life has had highs and lows, tragedies and scandals, but she has remained grateful for wherever she is in the moment. For now, that is where her answer sits: not in a fairy tale ending, but in the freedom to keep changing what love means.
