How Katy and Russell Spent New Year’s Eve

I have to tell you guys: I have never been so depressed over a celebrity uncoupling as I have been over Katy Perry and Russell Brand‘s pending divorce. Like, I was pretty sad when Lisa Loeb and Dweezil Zappa broke up, pretty sad about the Tim Robbins/Susan Sarandon split, and pretty sad about Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon filing for divorce—that last one coincided with my own breakup, so it was very yikes, is there no true love? Is there no hope for the rest of us?

The erstwhile couple spent the holidays apart after a huge spat, as we all know; Russell Brand filed the paperwork on December 30. So how did Katy and Russell each spend New Year’s Eve?

Katy spent New Year’s looking chipper at a party in West Hollywood (she was “in a great mood,” according to the New York Post). Evidently, Mrs. Brand spent most of the party chatting and dancing with a “long-haired man” who, according to reports, was a “dead-ringer” for her husband. Oh, dear.

And how did Russell spend New Year’s Eve? Was he with some busty blonde supermodel? Perhaps he partied with some tattooed female rock stars?

Nope.

Here’s MTV:

While Perry let her hair down in LA, Brand spent New Year’s Eve alone at the Savoy Hotel in London, with a source telling The Mirror: “He wasn’t up for celebrating and just ordered food to his room. The next morning he was in the gym from 11am and spent two hours there.”

Reports claim when a gym goer at the hotel wished the 36-year-old funnyman a Happy New Year, Brand replied: “Here’s hoping it gets happier.”

Oh, my God. Just, oh my God at both of them. They are both piteous.

MTV goes right on to add the couple had no prenup, which means Russell is expected to get half of Katy’s estimated $44 million fortune. So maybe in a year Russell will get to stay at an even bigger hotel, order better room service, maybe have a whole gym delivered to his room.

Ah! Katy and Russell—they were my new picks for the Couple Most Likely to Surprise and Persevere. I love that Katy is a good-girl-gone-weird, and Russell seemed to be the right breed of bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold to help Katy untangle the mysteries of her own heart. “Projection much, Jenn?” Sure, OK.

Still. You can have all the love and magic in the world, but when magic fades, all you have left is a person to fight with. Why can’t people learn how to fight better? Why can’t couples have more constructive, adult arguments, where the goal isn’t for one person to “win”?

Because every report suggests that this couple started having pissing contents, where one person would be “proud” and the other person, equally proud, would “call the bluff.” That, of the two, Katy is in fact the petulant child, who was so strait-laced and goody-goody in youth (and she’s still so young!) she is only just now working out her jollies, never mind her career.

This couple doesn’t have irreconcilable differences at all: they need to learn how to have a real fight, the scary kind where one person says something in a very low tone and then goes, “Now it’s your turn to respond.”