Join The Club
Emily Ratajkowski’s name has been in the headlines a lot over the past few years, often for her exquisite fashion moments like those futuristic floating shoulders but also for the high-profile men she’s dated. EmRata has been caught making out with Harry Styles, went on several dates with Brad Pitt, and briefly dated Pete Davidson post-Kim Kardashian. The model/actress opened up about what dating has been like since her divorce, including why she took on the "sexual but scary" persona of DC villain Poison Ivy.
Getting back in the saddle, so to speak, after the end of a marriage — Emily Ratajkowski divorced Sebastian Bear-McClard in 2022 after four years of marriage — can be a difficult thing, especially as the single mom of a toddler. The Gone Girl actress got candid in an essay for The Cut, saying she took on her supervillain persona when out with new men:
The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary. And she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis. She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous.
If I’m not mistaken, Poison Ivy is traditionally a protector of nature over humanity, so there’s probably something poetic in EmRata’s choice of villain, but whatever her reasons, it helped her escape the reality of being a single mother — something she said she’d always feared.
But, she asked herself, why should she feel bad about that? She continued:
‘Divorced single mom’? What about, instead, ‘a woman who needs nothing from men’? I already had the kid and the motherhood experience so many of my friends secretly coveted while pretending to date casually. I had no illusions about the romance of marriage or a shared life together. I’d learned the hard way that being alone was better than most partnerships. I’d seen too much, discovered what many women do only when they get divorced in their mid-40s. I’d lived through the failure of a unit, yet I was barely into my 30s. This was my villain origin story.
New York also played into her “supervillain bitch” era, she said, because while she may not be able to get free courtside Knicks tickets anymore, Emily Ratajkowski said she was empowered by carrying a stroller up stairwells and yelling at neighbors through her apartment wall. It was a more “Bohemian” lifestyle than driving a minivan in the suburbs.
We all have tricks and cheats that can help us bear tough circumstances, and I think it’s pretty metal that she leaned into the supervillain of it all to start dating again as a single mom.
Emily Ratajkowski can be found most recently on Lena Dunham’s series Too Much, which is available to stream with a Netflix subscription, but we’re still holding out hope that her red swimsuit pics will get her on the new Baywatch.
