Godmother, Interrupted

It wasn’t an invitation to rekindle. It wasn’t a public stunt. It wasn’t even romantic. It was, as Raven-Symoné put it, “the weirdest thing I’ve ever been asked.” Her ex-boyfriend—the one she hasn’t dated in years—wanted her to be the godmother of his new child. She laughed at first. But then she realized he was serious.

Here we are, mid-2020s, and the architecture of intimacy has gone completely rogue. The ask—a sweet, surreal fusion of sentimentality and psychodrama—wasn’t just about honor. It was about legacy. And in that moment, what should have been a hallmark gesture cracked open a bigger, stranger question: how do we repurpose our former flames in a world that refuses to let love be linear?

The request wasn’t public until now. Raven dropped it casually on a podcast, as if she were remembering a dream half-forgotten by breakfast. But it stayed with her. And us. Because behind the absurdity lies a cultural mirror: godparenting isn’t about religion anymore, nor is it entirely about kin. It’s about chosen history. The people we once loved—even platonically, chaotically, briefly—still orbit us. So what happens when someone you slept with wants you to help raise the soul of their child?

Ghosts, But Make It Gentle

Celebrity culture tends to reward the brutal ends: the public breakups, the unfollowings, the savage silence. But what about the ones who don’t burn bridges—just quietly turn them into museums? There’s something radical, even poetic, about Raven’s anecdote. It reveals a softer rupture, one where exes don’t become enemies or strangers. Instead, they become… legacy placeholders.

It’s easy to make this about Raven’s queerness, or about the surreal crossover of Disney nostalgia and adult dynamics. But zoom out. We live in an era where emotional recycling is the new etiquette. Godparenting, in this case, becomes the high-art of reassigning emotional capital. The “ex” is no longer a warning label—they’re a witness. Someone who knew you when. Someone who, maybe, still wants a version of you in their future.

One could argue this is modern love’s most sophisticated flex: an ex not seeking closure, but continuity. No therapy sessions, no scorned DM leaks. Just a quiet, confusing request that says: I trust you with what I value most.

The New Bloodline Is Emotional

If the nuclear family was a contract, the postmodern one is performance art. We see it everywhere—queer platonic partnerships raising children, best friends acting as surrogates, co-parents who never dated, exes co-authoring memoirs. Raven-Symoné’s story slots perfectly into this shifting logic, where emotional roles are fluid and bloodlines are symbolic.

It’s tempting to reduce her anecdote to “celebrity weirdness,” but that misses the deeper tremor. In a world that no longer fits the neat binaries of partner vs ex, parent vs stranger, friend vs lover—we’re all being asked to invent new roles for each other. What is a godmother, really, if not the embodiment of spiritual trust? And what better candidate than someone who knew your faults up close and still showed up?

So maybe the strangest part of Raven’s story isn’t the ask—it’s that it didn’t seem so crazy, once you really thought about it.

We keep the people we used to love in boxes: too painful, too awkward, too dangerous to revisit. But what if they’re just waiting for a new role, a new name, a new title that doesn’t erase the past, but reframes it? Godmother might be a bizarre suggestion. Or it might be the only one that makes sense.

And maybe that’s the future of intimacy: less about possession, more about preservation. Fewer endings. More strange beginnings.