Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, and the Biology of Feeling "Really Alone" When You're Compared to an Ex
Sutton Foster is in a position no human body was built for. She's fifty-one, a two-time Tony winner, one of the most respected performers on Broadway, and she's spending her mornings reading internet comments that pit her against a woman she has never met. In a recent Daily Mail piece, she said she feels "really alone" right now, and pushed back on the cultural ritual of pitting women against one another. She and Hugh Jackman, who confirmed their relationship in January 2025 after he announced his split from Deborra-Lee Furness, were photographed looking tense. The internet did what the internet does.
I want to skip the gossip layer. The image of two famous people on a sidewalk tells you nothing useful. What Sutton said, on the other hand, tells you a great deal. "Really alone" is not a casual phrase. It is the most common answer my team has gotten from over forty thousand people when we asked what they feel deep down when love is not working. Not angry. Not disappointed. Alone.
That word matters, because aloneness in a bond is not an opinion. It's a biological alarm. And the way that alarm fires in a high-visibility relationship, with a thirty-year previous marriage hovering in the background and a million strangers running a public referendum on whether you measure up, is something I want to walk through carefully. Not because Sutton Foster needs my analysis. Because if you've ever stepped into a relationship where someone before you cast a long shadow, this is your dynamic too.
From the moment to the thread
When a new partner is being publicly measured against an ex, the cultural script demands a villain. Was she the home-wrecker? Was the ex too controlling? Is the man at the center oblivious? Those questions are seductive because they offer certainty. They are also almost always wrong. The actual story, the one happening inside two bodies trying to build something new on ground that won't stop shifting, has nothing to do with villains. It has to do with two people being asked to stay settled in their own skin while the entire internet performs a stress test on their bond.
That's what I want to write about. Not the photo. The biology underneath it.
The two questions your body asks
You are wired from birth to need a primary attachment figure. Not as a preference. As a survival requirement. Your body needs emotional bonding the way it needs oxygen, from the first breath to the last. That wiring never goes away. It just changes who it's pointed at.
Inside every adult bond, your physiology is running a constant background process, asking two questions. "Are you there for me?" And "Am I enough for you?" Every fight, every silence, every moment of distance is your body trying to get an answer. When the answer feels like a yes, the system settles. When the answer feels like a no, the alarm fires, and the parts of your brain that do nuance and patience and clever sentence construction go offline.
Now imagine you're Sutton. The question your body is asking is the second one. "Am I enough for you?" And the answer is being supplied not by Hugh, but by a million strangers writing comparison pieces about a woman he was married to for almost three decades. That is a bonding injury delivered by algorithm. Your physiology cannot tell the difference between a tabloid headline and a real signal from your partner that you don't measure up. It just hears the verdict.
This is why "really alone" is the right word. Loneliness inside a bond is what happens when the survival response cannot get a clean yes to those two questions. You can be sitting next to the person you love and feel like you're in a separate suffering bubble, because somewhere in your body the alarm has not stopped ringing. I've written more about this dynamic in The One Cup of Coffee That Almost Ended Our Marriage, where the small fight is never really about the small thing. It's a safety audit.
The Time Machine
Here's the part most people get wrong about a moment like this. They think Sutton's distress is about Hugh, or about Deborra-Lee, or about the tabloids. It isn't. Or rather, it isn't only that.
When your body gets hit with a comparison wound, it doesn't stay in the present. It time-travels. Whatever you learned about being not chosen, not seen, not preferred, all the way back to childhood, comes flooding into the current moment. Your body responds to the present provocation as if it were the original wound. That's why these moments feel so disproportionate. You're not just fighting the tabloid. You're fighting every previous time you were measured and found wanting.
This is what trauma actually is. Not a singular catastrophic event. The past merging with the present so completely that your body can't tell which decade it's in. A successful, accomplished, fifty-one-year-old Broadway star can be looking at a comment thread and, inside, be five years old again, watching a parent choose someone else's approval over hers. The internet does not know that. The internet is happy to keep feeding the wound.
The Waltz of Pain in a public relationship
Here's where the danger really begins. Under this kind of pressure, almost every couple slides into a predictable choreography. I call it the Waltz of Pain. One partner's protective strategy collides with the other's, and the relationship becomes a slow reenactment of wounds neither person created.
Sutton, if her body is reaching for reassurance, might protest the disconnection. She might bring it up at the wrong time. She might be tense in a photograph. She might ask Hugh, in a thousand small ways, "Am I enough? Am I real to you? Will you still be here when the next think piece lands?" That reaching, when it lands on a partner who is already overloaded by media attention and his own grief about a thirty-year marriage ending, can register as criticism. As pressure. As one more person needing something from him.
His likely response, if he's the type whose activation pushes him into silence, is to retreat. To get busy. To take the call. To say less. To soothe himself through work or distance. That retreat, however logical it feels to him, is then read by her body as confirmation. "I knew it. I'm not enough. He's already pulling away." Her reaching intensifies. His retreat deepens. Two people who genuinely love each other end up throwing emotional boomerangs, doing exactly what makes sense from inside their own pain, and gutting each other in the process.
Neither person is the villain here. The dance is the villain. The system they have co-created under impossible pressure is the villain. I wrote about exactly this kind of dynamic in the Paddy McGuinness and Christine split, because the structure repeats across every high-visibility breakup, every new pairing, every long marriage that quietly cracks apart. The names change. The choreography does not.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
Impact without intention
Here is the line I find myself saying in my office almost every day. Most of the hurt in a relationship comes from impact without intention.
Hugh almost certainly did not set out to make Sutton feel measured against his ex-wife. The press did that. The audience did that. The structure of public life did that. But here is what does not help in this moment: him explaining, logically, that he did not cause the problem. The logical defense of intentions, when a partner's bond feels under threat, is gasoline on the fire. The prefrontal cortex is offline. You cannot solve an emotional rupture with a logistical argument.
What I teach couples is what I call Connection First, Problem Solving Later. Before you can talk about strategy, before you can talk about PR, before you can talk about what to do about the comment sections, the body that feels alone has to feel found. He has to put down the defense and come close. He has to let her know that her pain makes sense to him, that he sees it, that he is not going anywhere. Only after the alarm settles can the two of them actually think together about how to live inside this strange new public life.
If you've never watched your partner refuse to defend themselves and instead just sit with your pain, you don't know yet what that does to the body. It is the closest thing I know to a magic trick.
The Versus Illusion
The other thing the culture wants from this story is a war between two women. Sutton named it directly. "Women shouldn't be pitted against one another." She's right, and not just morally. She's right clinically.
When you are inside relational pain, the algorithm of the mind, and now literally the algorithm of your phone, wants to give you a villain. It is so much easier on your physiology to externalize the suffering than to feel the actual ache. Deborra-Lee becomes the obstacle. Or Sutton becomes the obstacle. Or Hugh becomes the cad. The story tidies itself up. The internet feasts.
But what this framing does is keep you stuck. Because as long as the problem is a person out there, you cannot do the only work that ever actually helps, which is the work inside your own body, with the partner you are actually with. There is no villain. There is a thirty-year marriage that ended. There is a new bond trying to take root. There is grief, on every side. There is a public that does not get to be in this story but acts like it has a vote.
What it takes to survive this kind of pressure is what I call Empathy Cubed. Compassion for yourself. Compassion for your partner. And compassion for the tragic, impossible system the two of you have been dropped inside. We are both hurting. We are both reacting. And it is only happening because we are so important to each other.
The rebound shadow, and why it doesn't apply the way the internet thinks it does
The other thing the audience is doing with this story is calling it a rebound. Hugh and Deborra-Lee announced their split. A year later he confirmed Sutton. The math is enough for the internet. I wrote a long piece on what a rebound relationship actually is, and I'll say here what I said there. A rebound is not defined by timing. It's defined by function. The question is not how many months have passed. The question is what the new relationship is doing for the body underneath. Is the new bond being asked to anesthetize a pain that hasn't been faced? Or is it a real meeting between two adults who happen to have arrived at the same crossroads?
I have no idea which one this is for Hugh and Sutton. Nobody outside their living room does. The press doesn't. The pals voicing fears don't. You don't. But the rebound conversation is a useful diagnostic for anyone reading this, because most of us, at some point, have been on one side or the other of this question. Is this person here because I am running from a feeling I cannot tolerate? Or is this person here because I am genuinely meeting them?
The answer is rarely clean. The answer is almost always work.
What this means if you're not famous
You will probably never be photographed on a sidewalk with a tabloid caption underneath you. But you have almost certainly stood inside this dynamic. You started dating someone whose ex-wife is in the parenting group chat. You moved in with someone whose long-term partner is the godparent of a mutual friend's child. You married someone whose mother still talks about the one who came before you. You are being compared, in small ways and large, and your body is logging every comparison.
The shape of your life is different. The biology is identical. The question your body asks does not care about your celebrity status. "Am I enough for you?" is the same question whether you ask it from a Manhattan penthouse or a kitchen in Ohio.
What you do with the question is what matters. You can spend the next decade trying to win a contest that nobody can actually win, because the contest itself is the problem. Or you can do the harder thing. You can let your partner know you feel alone. Not as a complaint. Not as a weapon. As a request to be found. And your partner can do their work, which is to stop defending intentions and start showing up to the impact.
That is the real labor of love. Unglamorous. Repeated. Daily. The kind of bond a person does not want to leave, because being inside it is the safest place they've ever stood.
What to do next
If you are reading this because some version of this dynamic is alive in your own life, the comparison wound, the ex-shaped shadow, the feeling of being on trial for a verdict that already feels rigged, you have options today.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
Sutton said something the internet didn't deserve. She said she feels alone, and she refused to be drafted into a war with another woman. That is sovereignty in the middle of a storm. Whether or not she and Hugh make it through this chapter is none of our business. Whether you and yours do is yours to write. Stop looking for the villain. Start looking for your partner. The contest is rigged. The work is real.
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