Ranked from blink-and-it’s-over to a slow eight-month fade, these seven marriages trace every way a celebrity wedding can unravel — a tabloid timeline built entirely from the record PEOPLE assembled.
1. 55 Hours — Britney Spears and Jason Alexander
A black cropped shirt, a baseball cap, jeans and the Little White Wedding Chapel in January 2004: the most famous anti-fairytale wedding in pop history. The annulment filing landed 55 hours later; a source called it “a joke that went too far,” and Spears’ 2023 memoir supplied the epitaph — “he and I were not in love. I was just honestly very drunk.”
(Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))2. 9 Days — Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman
Married Nov. 14, 1998, at Little Chapel of the Flowers; annulment filed by Rodman nine days later; a brief reconciliation; divorce in spring 1999. Electra’s retrospective advice to PEOPLE remains the genre’s best one-liner: “My advice to anyone is to not get married in Vegas.”
3. 72 Days — Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries
The Aug. 20, 2011 wedding was lavish, televised and — by Kardashian’s own later account — entered under “pressure.” She filed Oct. 31, 2011; the split took until April 2013 to settle and June 2013 to finalize. On the 2021 reunion she owned her part: “I fully broke up with him in the worst way … I learned so much from it.”
(Festival TV Monte-Carlo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0))4. 107 Days — Lisa Marie Presley and Nicolas Cage
An island wedding in Hawaii on Aug. 10, 2002, after an on-and-off courtship that began at a 2000 party; divorce filed Nov. 25, 2002; finalized only in May 2004. Time softened it into affection: after her death in January 2023, Cage remembered “the greatest laugh of anyone I ever met.”
5. 5 Months — Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray
Teen-drama costars, an April 2005 oceanfront wedding, a separation five months later and a December 2006 divorce. Both have since delivered the same verdict in different words — Murray to The Cut in 2024: “I was a baby”; Bush on Call Her Daddy in October 2026: “We were kids … No harm, no foul.”
(dodge challenger1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))6 and 7. 8 Months — Cyrus/Hemsworth and Moss/Armisen
Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth took the longest road to the shortest marriage: met 2009, engaged 2012, married December 2018, separated by August 2019 with a joint statement asking fans to “respect their process and privacy”; divorced Jan. 28, 2020. Elisabeth Moss and Fred Armisen met on the SNL set in October 2008, married Oct. 25, 2009, and separated June 26, 2010; her Page Six line about his impersonation of “a normal person” and his 2015 admission of intimacy issues — “all of a sudden, there’s a real person there” — remain the most quoted post-mortem in the set.
The Details Time Forgot to Soften
Some entries on this list come with footnotes that only grew stranger with age. Spears and Alexander were not strangers swept up in a chapel line — they were childhood friends from the same Louisiana town, Kentwood, which makes the 55-hour marriage less a random Vegas accident than a hometown story that took one very public wrong turn. Electra and Rodman, uniquely here, tried again: after the nine-day annulment filing they reconciled, and the marriage formally ended in divorce only in the spring of 1999 — meaning the shortest union on paper was, in practice, an on-and-off relationship of months. And Kardashian’s 72 days were followed by the longest tail of all: a settlement in April 2013 and a finalized divorce that June, by which time she was already expecting her first child with Kanye West. The marriage lasted ten weeks; the paperwork lasted nearly two years.
The middle of the ranking has its own echoes. Presley and Cage began at a party in 2000 and ricocheted on and off for two years before the Hawaii wedding — a reminder that a short marriage can sit at the end of a long courtship, a pattern Cyrus and Hemsworth would repeat at even greater length. Bush and Murray, meanwhile, had to keep working together: their characters’ show, One Tree Hill, was the set where they met in 2003, and their April 2005 oceanfront ceremony was a teen-drama fairytale the audience watched collapse in five months. Murray’s 2024 reflection to The Cut remains the most disarming in the set: “I didn’t know up, down, left, right. You move out there and you go, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do now? Get married? That’s exciting!'”
And the two eight-month marriages bookend the list with the decade’s most quoted post-mortems. Moss filed in September 2010 citing irreconcilable differences, listing June 26 as the separation date — barely a year after a wedding at The Foundry in Long Island City that followed a meeting on the Saturday Night Live set in October 2008. Armisen’s later explanation, delivered on a podcast in 2015, was unusually confessional: “I get lost in fantasy a lot. The fantasy of this person from Mad Men, you know, great actress. And then as a person is interesting … all of a sudden, it’s like a slide.” Against that, Cyrus and Hemsworth’s joint statement of August 2019 was a model of restraint: “They still remain dedicated parents to all of their animals they share while lovingly taking this time apart. Please respect their process and privacy.”
What the Ranking Really Shows
Read in order, the list is a gradient of self-knowledge. The shortest marriages ended with a statement and a shrug; the longer ones ended with statements too, but the quotes, given years later, in interviews and memoirs, are strikingly free of bitterness — drunk, bored, babies, kids, pressure. Almost everyone, eventually, blamed the timing rather than the person.