Those whom Big Brother bought together, let no man put asunder.
No more false alarms, no more resolutions to ignore the rumours, because that pain you are feeling is now very, very real.
Preston and Chantelle have split.
Lost in Showbiz is too devastated to look up their surnames.
But they were, of course, the couple who met on Celebrity Big Brother 2006, back when the show was about so much more than highlighting changing attitudes to race and empire in postwar Britain. Chantelle was just a civilian told to pretend she was a celebrity by Channel 4, while Preston was - God, what DID he do? I guess it doesn't matter now.
Not since Britney Spears parted from her backing-dancer house-husband Kevin Federline has a celebrity split drawn such an anguished "WHY?" from our lips, and in an attempt to alleviate the confusion and perhaps avert crowd trouble in grief hotspots up and down the land, the ex-couple have issued an exquisitely brief statement on the matter.
"After much soul-searching and tearful discussions -" save the backstory for the magazine deal, kids! - "- we have sadly decided to end our marriage. We hope we can always remain friends and still love each other, but we both think we put so much pressure on one another to make our marriage work that it has ended up destroying our relationship."
A veritable Escher-drawing of an excuse. But we have more to get through.
"We know people will think we married too quickly on the back of Big Brother," continue the former inspirations to thousands of lonely teens dreaming that one day they too might find self-validating romance in the Bungalow of the Damned, "but the truth is that, what anyone thinks, we did have a whirlwind romance but we were genuinely in love with each other at the time and we will never regret our time together.
"We both believe in marriage -" is there much more of this? "- and we never treated our vows or our commitment to each other lightly. We've spent hours and hours discussing whether we can salvage our marriage, give it another go, try harder, anything rather than give up.
"But we now both agree -" Steroids! Lost in Showbiz calls for steroids! This column will not go one step further without artificial help! "- that we should go our separate ways. We are both young and we still have our lives in front of us. The last two weeks or so have been very upsetting and sad for us and our friends and family and we appreciate their support."
And with that, all that remains is for the tabloids to dispatch their traditional sympathy package, filled with scores of reporters whose sole mission it is to uncover which of one of the couple had sex with someone else.
