Chris Martin Struggled With a ‘Year of Depression’ Following Gwyneth Paltrow Split
Chris Martin (Photo: Getty Images)
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet — and, apparently, a breakup by any other name is just as hard. On Sunday, Chris Martin revealed that despite his best efforts to make his “conscious uncoupling” from Gwyneth Paltrow as painless as possible, he still struggled to find happiness on the other side. (ICYMI, in March 2014, the Coldplay rocker and Paltrow announced that they were splitting after more than a decade of marriage, via her Goop newsletter.)
In the aftermath of their announcement, which, as his ex explained, “broke the Internet,” Martin found solace in literature, he told the U.K.’s Sunday Times. He read The Guest House, a 13th century scholarly work by the Persian poet Rumi, and Man’s Search for Meaning, a Holocaust memoir and psychotherapeutic manual by the famed Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl.
“That one Rumi poem changes everything,” Martin mused. “It says that even when you’re unhappy, it’s good for you. I was like, ‘What?!’ It took me about a year to get it — a year of depression and all that.” While he isn’t claiming to be completely over the breakup blues just yet, he is definitely on the mend. “I still wake up down a lot of days, but now I feel like I’ve been given the tools to turn it around,” he said.
Martin with Gwyneth Paltrow in 2014 — just before their “conscious uncoupling.” (Photo: Getty Images)
For Martin, those tools included a healthy dose of self-reflection. “You can come at it very aggressively and blame and blame,” he explained of going through a split. “Or you can put yourself in the garage, so to speak, take yourself apart and clean off the bits, reassemble.”
That’s working, for the most part. “It’s always out there in the media, but I have a very wonderful separation-divorce,” he said. (It’s probably worth noting, however, that two years after their announcement, their actual divorce still isn’t finalized.) “It’s funny. I don’t think about that word very often: divorce. I don’t see it that way. I see it more like, you meet someone, you have some time together, and things just move through.” He added, “I’ve lived a lot of life since then.”
In the past two years, Martin has been romantically linked to Jennifer Lawrence as well as actress Annabelle Wallis. For her part, Paltrow has been tied to Glee co-creator Brad Falchuk since the summer of 2014. Martin and Paltrow share two children together, Apple, 11, and Moses, 9.
