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Gone Girl’s “cool girl” monologue has been dissected to death, and for good reason; little else has so effectively captured the bind that straight women are in. In 2012, Gillian Flynn wrote about the burdens of the cool girl in her novel, and eventually, it was culturally canonized by Rosamund Pike in the 2014 film adaptation. “Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex,” Flynn wrote. “Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.”
The Cool Girl is ostensibly the girl all the guys want to date; the hope, for the Cool Girl, is to hold on to her coolness even after marriage and children harden her to her husband’s desires. And no one did a better job being a Cool Girl Wife than Bunnie Xo.
Married to preternaturally annoying country rapper Jelly Roll since 2016, Bunnie Xo was an especially cool Cool Girl. They eloped in Las Vegas after knowing each other for just a year, after meeting at one of Jelly Roll’s concerts. Back then, he was a struggling musician whose records (Sobriety Sucks and the following year’s Addiction Kills) weren’t charting, while he lived in a van with no financial security.
But Bunnie Xo was a steadfast partner, and an especially cool one. She supported him through his recovery from a cocaine and pill addiction, as well as his dramatic weight loss, which he says has revolutionized his physical health. She has helped him raise his two children, assisting him in getting custody while maintaining their relationship with their mother. To fund his nascent career, she did sex work to pay his bills. When he cheated, she stayed, giving interviews about how she’d be willing to bring another woman into their bedroom in order to keep him from cheating again.
If this was all said and done to keep her family together, it didn’t work: In June, Jelly Roll filed for divorce, just a few months after the couple had been trying for a baby through IVF. All has been revealed not through typical celebrity statements via People or TMZ gossip or joint Instagram posts, but through Bunnie Xo’s podcast, Dumb Blonde. Jelly Roll has still said almost nothing about the split, except that they remain friends and there was no infidelity. Bunnie Xo remains the custodian of the story of their breakup; even without his voice, she has remained sympathetic to him.
In an episode of Dumb Blonde, Bunnie Xo lays out how they parted ways, saying that although she had wanted to work things out in therapy, he hadn’t. “It took me a month and a half now to respect that,” she said. “My husband and I are ending this marriage on the best possible terms you could ever have a divorce.”
What happens to the Cool Girl when she gets a divorce? There are only a few options; one is to go nuclear, to unleash all the pent-up frustration that accrued as you were trying to accommodate your husband in the coolest way possible. The other is how Bunnie Xo is handling her divorce, which is to try to seem totally chill about it, often to the detriment of her own public persona.
Bunnie Xo has a long history of making her marital strife her fault, even when the public might disagree. During their relationship, Jelly Roll had a nearly yearlong affair, a betrayal she wrote about in her memoir Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic, which came out this spring. “Instead of looking at him and being like, ‘This is your fault,’ I looked within myself and was like, Why do I keep attracting these types of men?” she told Kelly Clarkson earlier this year. “I have been given so many second chances in my life. I truly believe that man deserved a second chance.”
Her description of their breakup, in fact, feels more sympathetic to Jelly Roll than to herself. “In a twin-flame relationship, there’s a runner and a chaser. He’s the runner, I’m the chaser. I stopped chasing him,” she said on her podcast. “This isn’t what you guys think this is. Nobody cheated on the other person. We served our purpose for each other.”
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Meanwhile, she’s encouraging available women to slide into her ex’s DMs and shoot their shot. “My husband is ready to date. He’s raring and ready to go. He’s all hopped up on testosterone. He’s even started dating, which is great—I love that,” she said on her podcast. “I think he wants the complete opposite of me, which is what he deserves.”
Bunnie Xo is well within her rights to share details of her divorce, but what’s peculiar are the kinds of details she’s offering. In her initial podcast episode, she mostly reassured her audience that her husband was free to do what he pleased, and that she respected his decision to leave the marriage, all while she helps raise his children. There’s no rage or scores to be settled; instead, she seems to be doing a strange kind of PR for her ex, telling the audience that they’re still friends and it’s all totally cool. She deleted the podcast episode announcing their split, but seemingly to protect their public personas as they navigate a breakup that’s becoming more infamous than their marriage. Bunnie Xo also says they’ll still try for a baby in order to co-parent, though she admitted that IVF left her feeling emotionally and physically “wrecked,” an experience that sounds like hers and hers alone, while her husband was touring and working.
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Bunnie Xo is in a bind. To be too angry at Jelly Roll (warranted or not) would turn her into another shrieking harpy, another woman left by her more famous husband right as his fame crested into another echelon. She’s left with trying to maintain her Cool Girl status through a divorce, much like she did through his earlier affair. She reassures strangers that they can safely shoot their shot with Jelly Roll, while still calling him “my husband.” She has recently alluded to her own heartbreak—needing IVs because, in her depression about her relationship falling apart, she wasn’t eating—but the blame lands on no one but herself. That’s what the Cool Girls does: She internalizes the failure of a relationship so that her husband (or ex-husband) can remain clean.
Bunnie isn’t sitting on her hands at home—she was recently seen kissing a reality star at the bar her estranged husband owns in Nashville. (Cue a sea of “Good for her” Jessica Walter GIFs.) But even in her divorce, she’s still performing Cool Girl bona fides: Please don’t get mad at my husband, know that my husband is still a good man, my husband and I are staying friends, go on ahead and fuck my husband. Maybe all of that is true, but it’s also no longer her responsibility, a story she doesn’t have to tell anymore.
But that’s the trouble with being a Cool Girl. It feels like a lifetime appointment.
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