The real reason Scarlett divorced Ryan Reynolds

Remember when Ryan Reynolds was married to Scarlett Johansson for a blink of an eye? We almost forgot too. They began dating in 2007, tied the knot in 2008, and split in December 2010, and they were both so private and secretive about the whole thing that there's very little photographic evidence they were ever together at all. So what went wrong?



She may not have been ready for the commitment

After their divorce, Johansson hinted that she may not have known how to handle such a serious relationship. They got together when she was just 23 to Reynolds' 31. She explained to Glamour in 2014, "I feel I know now more of what I need in a relationship, what I want in a relationship. And I know I have more tools to communicate, not just with my partner, but with myself. That's not necessarily any reflection of who I was married to or what was happening in my marriage, but really where I was in my life." Considering Reynolds had jumped from a lengthy engagement with "You Oughta Know" singer Alanis Morisette into a romance with the Avengers star, he may have been too eager to pick up where his previous relationship left off, resulting in the new couple marrying before either person was truly ready.



 Their personalities clashed

Sources told InTouch that Johansson and Reynolds started as a case of opposites attract—and that in the end, they realized opposites are actually incompatible. "He's more traditional and she's more independent," an insider said (via the Daily Mail). "They're both strong-willed and stubborn people. There was a lack of warmth between them, that was troubling…He said it sounded like she was yelling at him every time she talked to him. When Scarlett visited Ryan on the set of The Proposal (2009), she was screaming at him in his trailer—going nuts."


He may have felt threatened by her success

In April 2016, Johansson hinted to Cosmopolitan that career competition with Reynolds may have played a role in their split. "The logistics of being with another actor are challenging," she said (via E! News). "There has to be a real understanding of how you share your time, especially when two people's careers are going at the same rate. Or even if one person is more successful than the other, that also proves challenging. There may be a competitive thing.

That echoes her sentiments a year earlier when she hinted to Parade that Reynolds' box office bombs may have played a role in their divorce. "Acting is a very strange world to be co-existing in," she said. "It's very volatile. There's always going to be the more successful person. It's related to rejection. Because actors, if they're not having success, connect it directly to unpopularity—to the fact that nobody wants them." She added, "[Marriage] takes a lot of work. It takes a man who's not only confident in the love that you have for one another, but confident in what he has going on in his own career. He has to be in a field that's completely different from yours." Ouch!



She's more private than he is

There are hardly any photographs of Johansson and Reynolds together. That seems to be more of Johansson's doing: you rarely really see her parading around in public with her paramours — not even her second husband, French journalist Romain Dauriac, whom she married in a secret ceremony in 2014 and divorced as quietly as possible in 2017.

You do see Reynolds working those PDA moments with his second wife, actress Blake Lively, and he basked in the limelight with ex Alanis Morissette as well.

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