In the week that Britney Spears turned 43, her divorce from her husband-of-14 months, Sam Asghari, was finalised and she was declared legally single.

The singer has alluded to both milestones on social media in videos. On 21 October, she posted a clip of herself dancing in a white satin dress with a veil on to Sting’s ‘Fields of Gold’ with the caption, ‘The day I married myself… Bringing it back because it might seem embarrassing or stupid, but I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done !!!’.

On 2 December, she posted a video declaring, ‘It’s my birthday. I’m not turning 42 this year, I’m turning five years old, and I have to go to kindergarten tomorrow.’ In a second video posted on the same day, she spoke about how ‘incredibly cruel’ the paparazzi have been to her over the years before revealing that she has moved to Mexico. 

Shortly after Asghari filed for divorce in August 2023, Spears entered an on-off relationship with her former housekeeper, Paul Richard Soliz. However, Soliz and Spears’ relationship has proved troublesome.

Why? Well, Soliz is a convicted felon and is still legally married himself. In October, his wife Nicole Mancilla filed for divorce citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ and claims her estranged husband has neglected his relationship with his children to prioritise being with Spears. She has filed for legal and physical custody of their three children and in May she told the Daily Mail, ‘My husband fell in Britney Spears’ p***y. He was married, and now he denies his children. He neglects his children for her.’

Mancilla’s mother Sandra Smith then claimed Soliz had taken three of their five children – Soliz has nine children in total – to live at Spears’ house. ‘We are trying to get those kids back,’ Smith claimed during an interview on the Drew Lane Show, while also claiming that Soliz does not pay child support. He responded by ordering a temporary restraining order against his mother-in-law claiming he is victim of ‘emotional abuse’.

It’s certainly a relationship that has raised a lot of eyebrows. In May, further concerns were sparked when the couple was involved in a heated argument at the Chateau Marmont in LA, which resulted in an ambulance being called.

Spears later shared photos of her foot injury on social media, which allegedly took place the night of the altercation. By July, she took to Instagram to say she was ‘single as f**k’, with sources saying she called things off with Soliz because she thought he was taking advantage of her.

However, in August she was spotted at a trampoline park in California with Soliz and three of his children. It is difficult to tell from her cryptic social media posts whether they are still together, but on 16 November Spears posted a photo of a child’s hair decorated with flowers on what looks like a private jet. ‘The crazy girl stuff we end up doing,’ she wrote. Whether this is one of Soliz’s children is unclear.

Apparently, the singer’s inner circle has growing concerns that the couple are headed for marriage. However, Spears did have a pre-nuptial agreement with Asghari that meant he was left with very little after their divorce.

Bryan Spears – Britney’s older brother who she has always remained close with – has reportedly tried to convince her to break up with Soliz on a number of occasions. Spears is also reportedly in the process of  reconciling with her own sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James, who she shares with her ex-husband Kevin Federline. Despite both sons living in Hawaii with their father, his wife and their two half siblings, Jayden has reportedly reached out to his mother in recent months and has been to visit her home in LA.

Now that he is 18, it not only means Spears has had her child support payments to Federline halved from $40,000 to $20,000, but Jayden has the freedom to visit and reconnect with his mother should he want to. This is something Spears publicly longed for, even dedicating her 2023 memoir, The Woman In Me, to ‘my boys, who are the loves of my life’.

Spears is only two years out of her 13-year conservatorship, whereby her father Jamie Spears had control over almost every aspect of her life – from her health and finances to her decision making. Its end was the work of the #FreeBritney movement, Spears’ own testimony in June 2021 where she described her conservatorship as abusive, and the release of the Framing Britney Spears documentary – all of which applied pressure on the courts to grant her freedom and the restoration of her civil rights and liberties. Her father maintains that he always acted in her best interests.

Now Spears finds herself, at 43, single and free in ways that she is not accustomed to. After all, she has been treated as a commodity since she was 16 years old – hounded by the paparazzi, scrutinised by the press and relentlessly mocked by some of her peers and internet trolls alike. 

In October 2023, Spears attempted to chart her experiences, in particular her struggle to break the conservatorship that dictated her life, in her memoir. Not only was it an instant best-seller and one of the biggest book deals of all time, but the rights to adapt it for the big screen have since been acquired by Universal, with the Wicked director Jon M Chu set to direct and La La Land’s Marc Platt drafted in as producer.

Chu said Spears’ story ‘deserves to be told properly’ and that she ‘represents a generation of people growing up in the 2000s and early ’90s’. The singer took to X to express her excitement writing that she’s ‘been working on a secret project with #Marc Platt. He’s always made my favourite movies’. However, it has not been confirmed that she is involved in the adaptation.

Even in the safest of hands, it’s possible that Spears’ story might become something for other people to dictate and ultimately profit from. It’s true that it deserves to be told properly. It’s also true that Spears remains one of celebrity culture’s most mistreated individuals. Let’s hope with her still relatively newfound freedom, she finds the power to reclaim it as her own.