Kanye West is making major celebrity headlines this week after going on multiple dates with Julia Fox,a new gossip star in the making. Yesterday afternoonPEOPLE.comdid one of those “everything to know about” posts and she showed up in similar fashion across the internet and social media. And then as more people started digging deeper into archives, it soon came out that Julia and Pete Davidson actually did a photoshoot together for Paper Magazine back in November 2019.

I mean, there are at least a hundred conspiracy theory threads you can pull. One of them, of course, always, is that this is all coming from the brain of Kris Jenner. Seriously, it’s a never-ending stream of self-generated content and intrigue which is why it’s actually not that fun, for me at least, to gossip about them. Because there’s not ever a “real story” to be analysed. For them, any story is enough, real or not.

Anyway, while Ye and Julia dominated the pop culture space yesterday morning, by the afternoon, the gossip pendulum had swung back to Pete and Kim Kardashian. TMZ posted photos of them on holiday together in the Bahamas – you can see thosehere. So is this the story? Are we getting a Celebrity Couple-Off to start the year? A proper tit for tat? A battle for attention in the time of TikTok? As mentioned, I’m not super invested in Pete and Kim, but I could be invested in a Celebrity Couple-Off. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good one.

And now my mind wanders back, to Celebrity Couple-Off Gossip Nostalgia. The year was 2005. Maybe because tomorrow is a major gossip anniversary.

On January 7, 2005, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston announced their separation. Like it is this year, January 7 was also a Friday in 2005. They did it late in the day, like after people had wrapped up work, trying to bury it for the weekend. Look at the time stamp onPEOPLE’s article about it.

Back to the couple-offing though… afterwards, as the entire planet knows, Brad and Angelina Jolie became a thing. But also, Jennifer started working onThe Break-Upwith Vince Vaughn and they became a thing. And if you were around back then, that was the Celebrity Couple-Off. Gossip headlines at the time alternated between Brange and Jen and Vince. A sighting from one couple would be followed by a sighting from the other. All coincidences, and no conspiracy, of course not.

Jen and Vince lasted just over a year. They announced their amicable real-life breakupin the fall of 2006and spoke about each other warmly afterwards. In 2008,Jen told Vogue that:

“I call Vince my defibrillator. He literally brought me back to life. My first gasp of air was a big laugh! It was great. I love him. He's a bull in a china shop. He was lovely and fun and perfect for the time we had together. And I needed that. And it sort of ran its course."

And at the time of that interview, she was dating John Mayer. That’s Gossip Nostalgia for another day. But that too became a Celebrity Couple-Off in the culture.