Gyneth Paltrow has opened up about famously “consciously uncoupling” from ex-husband Chris Martin.
Paltrow was married to Martin for 11 years before they announced that they were splitting up. And now, in an essay for Vogue UK, she admits that they "didn’t quite fit together."
“We were close, though we had never fully settled into being a couple," the Goop creator wrote. “We just didn’t quite fit together. There was always a bit of unease and unrest. But man, did we love our children.”
She and the Coldplay frontman share 16-year-old daughter Apple and 14-year-old son Moses. Paltrow has been sharing photos of Apple throughout lockdown.
The actress explained that she accepted that “unrelenting trickle of truth” while on a trip to the Tuscan countryside with Martin for her 38th birthday.
She wrote, “Between the day that I knew and the day we finally relented to the truth, we tried everything. We did not want to fail. We didn’t want to let anyone down. We desperately didn’t want to hurt our children. We didn’t want to lose our family.”
Paltrow went on to explain, "I had never heard of the phrase 'conscious uncoupling,'" which she later made famous after using the phrase in a Goop newsletter to convey her divorce announcement.
She wrote, "Frankly, the term sounded a bit full of itself, painfully progressive and hard to swallow. It was an idea introduced to us by our therapist, the man who helped us architect our new future. I was intrigued, less by the phrase, but by the 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. "
The Shakespeare in Love star explained, "We knew that the piece would generate a lot of attention – a celebrity couple ending their relationship always does – but I never could have anticipated what came next. The public’s surprise gave way quickly to ire and derision. A strange combination of mockery and anger that I had never seen. I was already pretty tattered from what had been a tough year. Frankly, the intensity of the response saw me bury my head in the sand deeper than I ever had in my very public life."
She ended the piece by saying that "conscious uncoupling/separation/divorce, whatever you want to call it, has now permeated the break-up culture," which is certainly true.
Since their divorce, she has married producer Brad Falchuk while Martin has been in a relationship with 50 Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson.
