Christie Brinkley is revisiting the idea of happily ever after after four marriages and four divorces. In a new Social Life magazine cover story, the 72-year-old said age has changed how she reads love, and the shift is sharper because it comes from lived history, not theory.
Social Life cover story
Brinkley told Devorah Rose, "I'm a believer in soulmates." She added, "But I don't know if they last forever in the way that I thought they would." That is the core of the change: she is not walking away from soulmates, she is separating the idea from permanence.
She went further, saying, "I also believe that soulmates can transform and still be soulmates even though it’s not the romantic soulmate anymore." For a public figure whose love life has been watched across decades, that is a more flexible view than the old romantic script. It also fits the frame of her memoir, Uptown Girl, which puts her private life and public image in the same lane.
1975 to 2008
Brinkley has been married four times. She married Jean-François Allaux in 1975 when she was 21, and that marriage ended in 1981. She later married Billy Joel in 1985; they divorced in 1994. Later in 1994, she married Richard Taubman, and that marriage ended in 1995.
In 1996, she married Peter Cook, and that marriage ended in 2008. Those dates matter because they show why her current view sounds less like a slogan and more like a conclusion drawn over time. The pattern is not one breakup; it is four marriages across three decades.
Age and freedom
Brinkley also tied the change to getting older. "I think that with age you get... freer," she said. "You do what you wanna do when you wanna do it." She added, "I think that there’s a freedom that comes with age and that’s quite wonderful.... You know what you like. You know what you don’t like. And you don’t feel like you have to put up with the stuff that you don’t like anymore."
That is the practical takeaway from the interview: the new version of romance is not about giving up on love, but about lowering the pressure to force a story that no longer fits. Brinkley said she has seen "a million ups and downs, highs and lows, tragedies and scandals and all of the above," yet added that she has remained grateful for wherever she is in the moment. Her latest view of soulmates lands there, with less fantasy and more room for change.
The unanswered part is the specific sequence of experiences that pushed her from lifelong permanence to transformation. What she has put on the record is enough to mark the direction: after four marriages, she now treats soulmates as something that can evolve, not simply end.
