Christie Brinkley is singing a different tune these days.
The “Uptown Girl” muse opened up about her approach to aging and finding love in a new interview with Social Life magazine for its latest cover story. The supermodel told editor Devorah Rose she’s rethinking what it means to live happily ever after.
“I’m a believer in soulmates,” the 72-year-old told the outlet. “But I don’t know if they last forever in the way that I thought they would.”
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“I also believe that soulmates can transform and still be soulmates even though it’s not the romantic soulmate anymore.”
Brinkley has been married four times. She married French artist Jean-François Allaux in 1975 when she was 21. The couple divorced in 1981.
Before marrying Billy Joel, Brinkley was in a relationship with French race car driver and Moët & Chandon heir Olivier Chandon de Brailles. The two met in 1982, and Chandon died at age 27 in 1983. Brinkley has since described his death as one of the most heartbreaking experiences of her life.
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Brinkley married Joel in 1985, and they divorced in 1994. Later that year, she married real estate developer Richard Taubman, though they divorced in 1995. In 1996, she married architect Peter Cook. Their marriage ended with a highly publicized divorce in 2008.
Today, Brinkley is embracing life on her own terms.
“I think that, with age, you get … freer,” she told the outlet. “You do what you wanna do when you wanna do it. I think that there’s a freedom that comes with age, and that’s quite wonderful. … You know what you like. You know what you don’t like. And you don’t feel like you have to put up with the stuff that you don’t like anymore.
“Of course, my life has had a million ups and downs, highs and lows, tragedies and scandals and all of the above,” she said. “But I think that, throughout it all, I’ve always been grateful for wherever I am in the moment. I always say that I’m happiest in the moment.”
In 2025, the star told The New York Times that she’s a “fool for love.”
“I’m too trusting,” she admitted when asked about what she’d learned from her marriages. “I’m a fool for love. That love takes work. Sometimes you need to rely on experts. I wish I could have found ways to save some; I wish I hadn’t married others.
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“I always believed in soulmates,” she told the outlet. “I thought I had four of them. Now I’m not sure. Maybe I had my two soulmates with Jean and Billy. Maybe I rushed out of my marriage to Jean. Maybe I should have tried to make it work longer with Billy. I did start to wonder if maybe it’s me — if I was unlovable.”
When asked, she clarified, “I’m not unlovable, but the relationships I was in made me feel unloved. I have enough self-esteem to know that, in the right arms, I’m lovable. And I wasn’t loved correctly. One loved my money more than me. Another loved his drink more than me. Another loved young women more than me. And in my first one, I loved my freedom more than him.”
Her first husband, Allaux, was the one she said she left for her “freedom.” She said it was “love at first sight” with him and that while their marriage was successful for years, it ended in a “slow dissolve.”
“I got married too young. I started to feel constrained and regretted being tied down,” she admitted.
Joel is the ex-husband she wrote about in her memoir, “Uptown Girl,” as the one who “loved his drink more than me.” The singer has been open about his past struggles with addiction, and Brinkley wrote that “booze was the other woman.” She said of their marriage, “When you become the bad cop, it’s over. If we had been older when it happened, maybe we could have figured it out.”
As for the ex who “loved my money more than me,” Brinkley was referring to her third husband, Taubman.
“Ricky was a larger-than-life character who married me for my money,” she claimed. “Our relationship was complicated by the fact that I was pregnant, and I wanted to make the right decisions. The relationship came on the heels of my divorce from Billy, which I was devastated about.”
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The ex she said “loved young women more than me” was Cook, who had an affair while married to Brinkley.
“I was married to a stranger who had other lives. I had three children. I wanted to protect them from the fallout and from their life being blown apart. The divorce lasted for years. It was agonizing.”
In her memoir, she called her relationship with Cook “one of the most tormented experiences I’ve ever had.”
Today, Brinkley says she hasn’t given up hope of embracing romance again.
“I find love is the strongest thing in the whole world, and we are surrounded with love,” she previously told Fox News Digital. “There are so many kinds of love: love for our friends, love for our families, love for nature and love for people that protect nature.
“I just feel like my life is so full of love. And, so, I think if there’s a romantic love that comes along as well, it would be wonderful. But I also feel very content and happy with the life that I have right now, and I consider my life to be very full of love.”
