Seven years after her divorce from Chris Martin, Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow is getting candid about the breakup, admitting she never wanted to finalize a separation between her and the Coldplay frontman. While in conversation with Anna Faris for her podcast Unqualified, Paltrow goes on to share how she never imagined the two would not be together after having two children together.
“I never wanted to get divorced,” Paltrow said. “I never wanted to not be married to the father of my kids, theoretically. But I have learned more about myself through that process than I could have imagined. And because I focused on accountability, I was then able to find the most amazing man and build something that I’ve never had before with Brad [Falchuk], my husband.”
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Since their “consciously uncoupling” in 2014, the Goop founder revealed last year in a personal essay how she and Martin not only tried everything to keep their marriage together but the moment she realized their relationship was officially over. “I had not grown up around a lot of divorces, and the divorce I had been privy to had been bitter, acrimonious, unending,” she wrote in the essay for British Vogue. “With all my heart, I did not want that.
She adds how it was around that time that the couple’s therapist introduced the concept of “conscious uncoupling,” which Paltrow admitted sounded “a bit full of itself, painfully progressive and hard to swallow.” However, it left her intrigued over the breakup mindset and sentiment. “Was there a world where we could break up and not lose everything? Could we be a family, even though we were not a couple? We decided to try,” she said, later admitting the two had “great days and terrible days,” all while staying steadfast in their goal while parenting their two children, Apple, 16, and Moses, 14.
As the concept prompted online ridicule and mockery for its novelness, Paltrow reveals she and Martin seemed to figure it out for themselves despite it taking a toll mentally. “It’s very different for every couple, but, for me, it meant, more than anything, being accountable for my own part in the dissolution of the relationship,” she said at the time. “There existed aspects of myself I was trying to heal through this relationship that I wasn’t honest with myself about. I had been blind, guarded, invulnerable, intolerant. I had to admit that and be brave enough to share it.”
After her divorce was finalized in 2016, the pair moved on — Martin has been dating actress Dakota Johnson, while Paltrow has been married to Brad Fulchuk since 2018. While speaking to Faris, she gushed over his “amazing qualities,” disclosing how the two were first friends. “I was like, ‘Are we going to date? Is this happening?’” she said. “I was scared because he is a person who demands presence and intimacy and communication in a way that I just didn’t know how to [do].”
She continued: “I like to fight by shutting down… I leave the room. And he’s like, ‘No,’ he’s like, ‘Absolutely not. We are sitting down, and we are figuring this out.’ And he demands that I am honest with myself in a way that is hard for me but which really helps me grow.”
