It’s almost poetic, but not in a good way, that a show that’s supposed to sell dream homes is now the setting for so many broken marriages. The personal lives of the cast of Selling Sunset have been falling apart in a way that goes beyond bad luck since the show’s premiere on Netflix in March 2019. Early on, viewers saw it. Tabloids gave it a name. And the cast members have lived it in ways that, no matter how hard they tried, no TV show could have scripted.
The first one was Chrishell Stause. After two years of marriage, her husband Justin Hartley filed for divorce in November 2019, just a few months after the show started. She found out through a text message, not a conversation or any other private way. After 45 minutes, it was open to everyone. That small detail—the text that came before the headline—alone shows how strange and fast-paced life can get when one or both people in a marriage live in public.
It wasn’t just the split that made Stause’s story stand out. It was seeing her think about it live on camera, while her coworkers asked questions and the cameras kept rolling. She later said that she had thought about leaving the show for good. The fact that she didn’t and that the season was some of the most-watched reality TV of that year is hard to deal with on its own. She made people mad, and they paid attention to her because of it. It’s possible that neither person fully understood what was being said at the time.
Hartley, on the other hand, never showed up on the show. He was there in conversations, in rumors, and in the way people talked about him carefully and then not so carefully. He said they were no longer together as of July 2019, which was months before the filing. Stause looked confused on camera when he said this because they had been seen together in public many times after July 2019. Most of the time, what’s true between two married people isn’t shown on film or reported accurately after the fact.
Years later, in March 2024, Chelsea Lazkani filed for divorce from Jeff Lazkani after almost ten years of marriage, saying they could no longer get along. There were hints, the kind you can only see now: vague comments on social media about how hard life is, and the flatness that comes from someone carefully choosing their words in public. It was getting hard to ignore the pattern that her story added to it.
It’s worth wondering if the show actually causes any of this or if it just draws in people whose lives are already complicated enough to make good TV. Most likely both, though different people will need different amounts of each. There is a version of this where the cameras only record what was happening. In a different version, long-term public exposure and the arguing over what to share and what to keep private slowly destroy the privacy that a marriage needs.
People have started calling it the “Selling Sunset curse,” but it’s not supernatural. It’s not as exciting as that, which makes it almost sadder. Fame changes things. Money changes things. When someone suddenly becomes famous, or when they marry someone famous, the rules of the relationship change in ways that are really hard to handle. Stause herself said that, pointing out that she had spent years making decisions to help Hartley’s career, only to wonder what she really wanted when everything fell apart.
That question hangs over the whole series, but the show doesn’t talk about it much. The commissions are amazing, the listings are beautiful, and the drama is real enough to hurt. That being said, the marriages keep breaking up. That seems less like a curse now and more like a pattern that needs to be taken seriously.
