Are you invested in the lives of people who you once sort of half-liked but now no longer remember at all?

You are? Then you might want to sit down. Remember Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley? Come on, yes you do. They were the king and queen of bad, faux-rebellious teenage music from several years ago. Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley. You remember. She was definitely a punk because sometimes she wore a tie in an ironic way and his name was both stupid and hard to spell. You remember Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley. You do.

Anyway, they’ve split up.

It’s always sad when a marriage comes to an end. Actually, no, that statement needs a qualifier. It’s more accurate to say that it’s always sad when a marriage comes to an end, unless it’s the marriage between Avril Lavigne and Sum 41 singer Deryck Whibley because – even if you sat in a darkened room for a month contemplating the end of their marriage while listening to the world’s saddest violin aria and remembering your most traumatic childhood moments – you’d still be hard pressed to feel even the slightest twitch of emotion about it.

There, that makes much more sense.

Anyway, when Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley got married, they had the whole world in their hands, by which we mean an embarrassingly large collection of skinny ties, a few songs that sounded suspiciously like songs recorded by other people, a fairly large house and a two sets of genes which – if combined – would almost certainly produce a rubber-faced midget baby with an uncontrollable drool problem and an unpleasant sense of entitlement.

But how quickly things change. According to reports, Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley have now split up. We’ll give you a few minutes to look up who Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley are on Wikipedia, and then you can read how Avril broke the news on her MySpace blog. Actually, we should probably give you a few more minutes so that you can look up what MySpace is on Wikipedia as well. Ready?

“Deryck and I have been together for six-and-a-half years. We have been friends since I was 17, started dating when I was 19, and married when I was 21. I am grateful for our time together, and I am grateful and blessed for our remaining friendship. I admire Deryck and have a great amount of respect for him. He is the most amazing person I know and I love him with all my heart. Deryck and I are separating and moving forward on a positive note.”

You see? That’s love. We wish that we could find someone who we loved, admired, respected and generally considered to be amazing enough to dump in order to find someone better, too. That Avril Lavinge, she’s so lucky.

Reports suggesting that Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley had agreed to break up months ago, but didn’t tell anyone because Avril had spent the intervening time trying to dumbly type her split statement on a microwave instead of a computer and Deryck kept clattering into walls because he’d forgotten what doors were, are untrue. Probably.

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