“Rehabilitated Brown or Delusional Rihanna? I go with the latter.”
So read the tweet from author and relationship expert Laurie Puhn Friday morning when she discovered that pop stars Chris Brown and Rihanna had rekindled their infamously volatile relationship—a mere three years after Brown was arrested for domestic abuse of the Barbadian singer and levied with a two-year restraining order.
Puhn was one of thousands to voice their distaste for the revamped romance. But a search for “Chris Brown Rihanna” on social media search engine Topsy reveals that opinions concerning the two’s relationship is not all that one-sided. Spliced between comparisons to similarly high-profile relationships clouded by domestic abuse—like those of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown and Ike and Tina Turner—there’s a large Twitter population that believes the two pop stars go together like Jay-Z and Beyonce.
“Oh so Chris Brown and Rihanna got back together..?” tweeted Jeremy Jones (@Who_JJones) this morning, before adding the harsh observation. “not a big deal. women get they ass beat then go back to that man ALL the time.”
“That’s the type of positivity I like!” wrote @Widowspeakbandit. “Forgiveness is a lost art.”
@OfficiallyLito was a bit more subdued in his happiness over the news, writing “Chris Brown & Rihanna are back together” before closing his tweet with a smiley face.
Brown and Rihanna’s turbulent relationship has been a major talking point on Twitter before news that the two would get back together even became public information.
Sunday at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, Brown’s three separate performances and acceptance of the award for Best R&B Album sparked the troubling trend of women tweeting that they’re so enamored of the pop star that they’d let Brown beat them up.
Yesterday, the hashtag #ChrisBrownPickupLine surfaced, with tweets ranging from variations on @popsicleV‘s “can i have your number,i promise i won’t beat you” to @CelebrityShark‘s “No, I didn’t ask if you like black guys. I asked if you like black eyes.”
Both left a glaring black eye on the American public’s stance on domestic abuse.
Perhaps the most fitting position on the issue is summed up by Chicago-based writer Ferrari Sheppard (@stopbeingfamous), who ran an hour-long rant about the week’s top pop news story this morning.
“What is there to learn from the Chris Brown and Rihanna situation? Now that they’re doing a song together,” he wrote before drawing allusions to James Brown’s domestic abuse trials and likening the Brown/Rihanna fiasco to a real-world employee beating up a colleague in the work place.
His closing point still resonates:
“I guess with any oppressed group there are two factions: those who want progress and those who do not.”
Photo via Twitter
