Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde Are Reportedly ‘Taking a Break’ After Almost 2 Years of Dating

After nearly two years and 10,000 tabloid headlines together, Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde are taking a break. That’s per People magazine anyways, which reports the pair have mutually agreed upon a change in relationship status as both their personal lives and careers take them in different directions.

"He's still touring and is now going abroad. She is focusing on her kids and her work in L.A.," a source tells the magazine. "It's a very amicable decision." Indeed, Styles’s Love on Tour will take him to Mexico next week, and he’ll continue playing Latin American dates for about the next month.

The source continues that while they’re still “very close friends,” at the moment, “they have different priorities that are keeping them apart."

People has a reputation for breaking reliable (if not carefully managed) celebrity news, so we doubt this is a misfire of misinformation or rumor mongering.

News that the 28-year-old singer and the 38-year-old director and actress were an item first broke back in January, 2021 and seemed to take most of the internet off guard. Wilde had only recently separated from her ex-fiancé Jason Sudeikis with whom she has two children, while Styles’s love life was known to be kept about as secret as an international heartthrob’s love life could be. The pair seemingly confirmed the news by attending a wedding together that month.

Yet, their relationship endured public interest and scrutiny, a poorly timed manilla envelope delivery of custody papers, the darker corners of the very impassioned online Styles fandom (something Styles himself has noted), and, oh right, the particularly dramatic rollout of the film on which they met, Don’t Worry Darling.

Wilde had cast Styles as the film’s male lead after original star Shia LaBeouf exited the project. The casting was greeted as a surprising but perhaps inspiring choice at the time, but eventually led to a once-in-generation Hollywood tale of behind-the-scenes intrigue, especially when the news of the pair’s relationship intertwined with rumors of lead star Florence Pugh’s dissatisfaction with the project. The public still doesn’t quite know what went down on that set, but at least we can all agree that Styles probably did not spit on co-star Chris Pine amidst the film’s tense premiere in Venice.

Yet, Wilde and Styles managed to keep it together privately during it all. Wilde attended one of Styles’s concert in Los Angeles with her two children just this week, and while the pair never walked a red carpet hand-in-hand, spottings of the couple together out and about in the real world weren’t entirely rare.

So, what went wrong? "The public pressure on them has been difficult," says People’s source. "They've had ups and downs throughout the relationship."

Understandable, frankly.

Just like the public never knew exactly what went on during the Don’t Worry Darling filming, we’ll probably never know for sure what went on in their relationship. Yet, our own lives continued. We’ll all find a way forward.

Perhaps the worst news for Styles and Wilde is that Twitter has managed to continue functioning today, despite worries it could falter under its own various Elon Musk-instigated inner-dramas. We’re sure users of the site will have a lot to say about the breakup, just as they had a lot to say about the relationship. Who knows. This could actually be the event that finally overloads the servers. It would be fitting revenge for all that “public pressure.”