Current couples by year: how each row gets its year

A year page is the same record with the sorting changed, and sorting is the whole of what chronology delivers. That sounds harmless, and it is where a lot of chronologies quietly start contradicting themselves, because a second view of the same rows is a second thing to keep true.

This page is about the design decisions underneath grouping a status record by year: which year a row belongs to, what a year heading implies that you probably do not mean, and whether the page earns its place at all.

What to take away

Which year a row belongs to

Most rows carry more than one date: when the thing occurred, when it was stated publicly, when you recorded it. Grouping forces you to elect one of those as "the year", and that election decides what kind of page you have built.

By event year, the page claims to know when things happened. For most of this material you do not, and the handful of rows where you genuinely do will be swamped by rows where the year is an estimate wearing a heading.

By disclosure year, the page indexes when claims entered the public record. That is something you can establish and defend, and it is the honest default.

By the year you recorded it, the page describes your own working schedule. Useful in a spreadsheet, meaningless to a reader.

Choose disclosure year unless you have a stated reason not to. Put the choice in a sentence at the top of the page.

A reader who has not been told the rule will assume event year, because a bare year heading looks like it means that. The five dates that can attach to a single item are separated out in the notes on relationship dates.

Three rows that refuse to sit in one year

Every year page has all three, and each one has a wrong answer that looks tidy.

The interval. Something that began in one year and was confirmed in another belongs to both and to neither. Repeating it under each heading double-counts it. Filing it under one hides it from the other. File it under the year of the confirmation, which is the thing you are actually recording, and let the entry text carry the earlier date.

The revision. An entry made in one year and corrected in a later one now has two lives. The correction has its own date and belongs in the later year as a correction. The original stays where it was, marked as superseded rather than removed.

The retroactive disclosure. A statement made this year about something years ago is a this-year item, and it is a later account rather than a primary source made at the time. Filing it under the earlier year rewrites the archive to look as though the fact was known at the time, which is the exact distortion a chronology exists to prevent.

The rule that covers all three: file by the date of the thing you are recording, not by the date of the thing it describes. A row about a statement is filed under the statement.

Two current couples, filed by year

The rule is easiest to see on real rows. Both couples below are together as of their most recent public record, and each produces rows that a careless year page would misfile.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Their 2002 collaboration on "'03 Bonnie & Clyde" featured Beyoncé as Jay-Z's then-girlfriend, so 2002 holds a row: a relationship referenced in a public credit. They kept a low profile while dating and married on April 4, 2008, in a private ceremony in Tribeca, New York City; the relationship became a matter of public record on April 22, 2008. The marriage row goes under 2008, filed by the public-record date, with the ceremony date in the entry text. Nothing goes under 2003 to 2007 merely because they were presumably together: no record was established in those years.

Gisele Bündchen and Joaquim Valente. They met in December 2021, when she started attending classes at the self-defense academy he runs with his brothers in Miami. That fact was reported later, so it is a retroactive disclosure: it belongs to the year it was disclosed, not under 2021. They were first romantically linked when spotted on vacation together in Costa Rica in November 2022, a month after Bündchen and Tom Brady finalized their divorce on 28 October 2022; that sighting is a 2022 row marked as a sighting. Bündchen has officially been in a relationship with Valente since June 2023, which is the 2023 confirmation row, and in October 2024 it was announced that she was pregnant with their first child together, a 2024 row.

Laid out by year, that couple's record reads 2022 (divorce from Brady; sighting with Valente), 2023 (confirmed relationship), 2024 (pregnancy announced). The 2021 meeting appears inside the entry text of the year it was disclosed, which keeps the archive from pretending anyone knew in 2021.

A sample year page, four current couples

Add two more couples who are together as of their latest public record, and a year page filed by disclosure year looks like this. Each date below is as given in the couple's Wikipedia biographies.

Beside the headings goes one sentence: these are the items that reached this record in each year, not a measure of what happened. The year still running carries "incomplete" in the heading itself.

Counting is the trap

One year heading with fourteen entries under it and the next with three reads to almost everyone as a fact about the world. It is a fact about attention. It reflects how many outlets were covering the subject, whether the desk was staffed all year, and whether a platform that supplied entries in one year still existed in the next.

If the page displays counts, it needs a sentence beside them saying what they count: how many items reached this record, and nothing further. If it does not display counts, readers will still form the comparison from the visual weight of each section, so the sentence is worth writing either way.

The same caution applies to an empty year. No entries means nothing was established and recorded. It does not mean nothing happened. A blank heading claims more than the evidence supports.

If a year is genuinely blank, write the blank out: no entries were added in this year.

Does the page earn its place

Before building one, answer what a reader gets here that the main record does not give them. There are two honest answers.

The first is navigation: a long record is hard to scan, and year anchors make it usable. The second is scope: a reader looking for what was established during a specific period gets a clean answer.

Neither answer needs new prose; both come from a generated view over the same rows, the arrangement worth aiming for. A hand-written year page is a fork: correct a row in one place but not the other, and you publish two versions of one claim, with no way for a reader to tell which is current.

The handling of corrections assumes one canonical row. A duplicated view breaks that assumption silently.

What a year page must not become is a summary. A year written up as an account of what happened acquires a shape, and the shape carries claims that no individual row supports. Keep it an index. The entry design behind each row is what carries the content.

Common questions

Should a year page repeat the source for every entry?

Yes, or link to the canonical row that carries it. An entry that appears without its sourcing in one view and with it in another trains readers to trust the unsourced version.

What about a year that is still running?

Label it as incomplete in the heading itself, not in a note underneath. A partial year sitting next to complete ones is read as complete.

Where do entries about people who are no longer together go?

They stay in the year they were established. Moving them is rewriting the archive. The framing change is a separate task, covered in the notes on how a current page ages.

Can I add a short line describing each year?

Only if the line is about the record, such as what was added and what was rechecked. A line describing the year itself is a summary of private lives assembled from fragments, which is the thing the main guide to current couples argues against throughout.