This week, Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodriguez got married. Far from a bells-and-whistles announcement, they posted a single photo on Instagram, showing only their respective left hands and simple gold wedding bands. Rodriguez’s oval-cut engagement ring, estimated to have cost up to $5 million, could be seen blurred in the background.
However, this will not be the photo from their wedding that I remember.
That photo is of a shocked bride, not Rodriguez, arriving at her wedding only to be greeted by crowds of thousands of fans anticipating the arrival of the football star and his wife-to-be.
To explain, we need to take a small step back in the timeline. Since announcing their engagement in August last year, there has been much speculation about when, and where, Ronaldo and model Rodriguez would get married. Last week, the rumour mill spun into motion with a believable story that the pair were to wed at the cathedral in the footballer’s hometown, Funchal, on the Portuguese island of Madeira.
Fast-forward to our shocked anonymous bride, who was understandably taken aback by the gathered hordes.
I got married in January and it was, as the cliche goes, the happiest day of my life. If I had stepped out of the car to be greeted by a thousand disappointed strangers, the day would have started on a decidedly more stressful note.
The rumours were, as they often are, wrong. According to Ronaldo’s management, the couple wed in a civil and private ceremony in Cascais, Portugal, about 1,000km from Funchal. The ceremony was, reportedly, only attended by the couple's five children.
Ronaldo and Rodriguez are far from the only celebrity couple to attract attention for their nuptials this summer. The weddings of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, and Dua Lipa and Callum Turner are two that spring to mind.
Swift and Kelce took a very different approach to Ronaldo and Rodriguez, booking New York’s Madison Square Garden for a locked-down and NDA-clad wedding in July. At the time of writing, there are no official photos of the Swift-Kelce wedding, despite plenty of hack AI jobs floating around and attempting to convince fans otherwise.
People had a lot to say about the couple choosing a sports and concert venue for their big day, well, big weekend. And I admit that, before the wedding, I assumed that the Madison Square Garden rumours were a decoy, a grand and very high-budget plan to distract fans from the real plans. I was wrong, and they did get married at the famous New York arena.
With hindsight, it makes a lot of sense. If Team Swift has well-earned experience in anything, it’s the meticulous running of an arena tour. So an arena wedding – with its tunnel entrances, secure underground loading areas, ability to be fully locked down by security, roof coverage and lack of windows – makes sense. Sure, there won’t be any natural light, but there also won’t be paparazzi helicopters buzzing overhead, trying to get a first glimpse of Swift in her white gown. We assume it was a white gown; we still don’t know.
In August 2023, Swift attended the New Jersey wedding of friend and collaborator Jack Antonoff. The music producer married actress Margaret Qualley in a ceremony considered low-key by celebrity standards. The hordes of Swifties gathered at the rehearsal and wedding venue, trying to get a glimpse of their favourite pop star, were, however, far from understated.
In the paparazzi images from the day, Swift appears bemused as she arrives and sees the gathered crowds. It's the exact moment, perhaps, that she realised that any future wedding she had would have to be considerably more cloak-and-dagger. It’s no surprise then that her own wedding invitations were reportedly watermarked to trace back any location, date and guest-list leaks.
The public’s obsession with celebrity weddings is nothing new. In 1996, John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette were married on the remote Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia in a bid to escape intense media scrutiny and paparazzi. Almost 30 years before them, Elvis and Priscilla Presley flew in secret from Palm Springs to Las Vegas, where they got married in front of about 14 people at the Aladdin Hotel.
What has changed is our access to celebrities via social media, and the expectation that we should be allowed to see every moment. The unfortunate bride in Funchal is perhaps the best illustration of this new reality. She isn’t famous, she wasn’t marrying Ronaldo and she hadn’t invited anyone but friends and family to her wedding. But for a few extraordinary minutes, she was caught in the machinery of celebrity culture simply because the internet had decided that she might be somebody else.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love looking at wedding pictures, celebrity or otherwise. But 10-plus years ago, if you weren’t a guest or in the gathered crowd, you’d have to wait for the photos to be published in Hello! magazine, or the like. There was a gatekeeper between the celebrity and the public. Today, a live stream of images can be delivered to millions at the click of a button, feeding the endless cycle of celebrity news.
The irony is that, at the same time, social media has given celebrities more control than ever over what we see. Ronaldo and Rodriguez gave us one carefully framed photograph. Swift and Kelce have, so far, given us nothing. The public may expect a front-row seat, but increasingly, the celebrities themselves decide whether the curtain goes up at all.
