Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 06/29/2012 at 3:41 PM News

The Popdust Files: r. kelly, soulacoaster, the notebook

There are so many ways that watching The Notebook can end a couple’s marriage that it doesn’t even seem like a fair fight. Maybe one of you thinks the movie is romantic and special and beautiful, and the other thinks it’s trite and hackneyed and manipulative. Maybe you both realize that the second one of you came down with Alzheimer’s, the other’d be out the door in two seconds flat. Maybe one of you realizes that you’d rather be with Ryan Gosling. Maybe both of you realize that you’d rather be with Ryan Gosling. Really, if you’re in a relationship, it’s just not a movie you should be watching.

R. Kelly learned this the hard way, as a solo viewing of The Notebook helped him come to terms with the inevitability of his marriage’s dissolution. (Hey, strong men also see The Notebook by themselves in theaters.) In another passage grabbed by Yahoo! News from his autobiography Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me (which is shaping up to be the must-read of the summer), Kells explains how Gosling and McAdams ended his civil union:

As the film credits started to roll, I couldn’t move…I burst into tears. People walking past me patted me on the back, trying to console me. The Notebook was beautiful, and I was crying because its hero and heroine had died together. But I was also crying because I remembered a Valentine’s Day — when a helicopter dropped a rainfall of roses — that had come and gone. My marriage had died. And there was nothing I could do to bring it back.

GOOOOOOOSLIIIIIIIING!!!! In the words of Drake, boo hoo, sad story, but nothing new when it comes to The Notebook‘s reign  of relationship terror. (Though WTF is with that “helicopter dropped a rainfall of roses” reference? Does that happen a lot in Chicago?) Anyway, this appears to be just scratching the surface of the craziness contained within Soulacoaster, as the rest of the Yahoo! News report also contains a detailed story of the time Kells’ wife Andrea threw a $50,000 ring in a pond (“I offered $10,000 to anyone who could fish that ring out of the pond. No one could”), as well as passing references to his being illiterate and his “being molested by a teenage girl when he was a child” (!!!!) We’re stopping at Barnes and Noble on the way home, for sure.