It’s “a bit full of itself, painfully progressive and hard to swallow”.
Surprisingly, it’s not Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest fad diet – it’s how she describes her “conscious uncoupling”.
The actress, 47, recalls how she realised her marriage to Coldplay’s Chris Martin was over on her 38th birthday. “I knew it,” she says. “It was in my bones.”
After a “tough” few years where the pair tried to navigate their split, both “philosophically and tactically”, a therapist flagged up “conscious uncoupling”.
“Frankly, the term sounded a bit full of itself, painfully progressive and hard to swallow,” Paltrow writes in Vogue.
“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?”
But their 2014 split announcement was met with “a strange combination of mockery and anger I have never seen.”
She adds: “The intensity of the response saw me bury my head in the sand deeper than I ever had in my very public life.”
Gwyneth, now married to TV producer Brad Falchuk, says she felt “close” to Chris and shared his sense of humour, but that they “never fully settled into being a couple”, adding: “We just didn’t quite fit in.
"There was always a bit of unease.”
