Gwyneth Paltrow Gets Candid About 'Conscious Uncoupling' Backlash & How it Made Her Feel
Gwyneth Paltrow is finally talking about the “conscious uncoupling” fallout. The phrase “conscious uncoupling” has become a big part of our culture since Paltrow and Martin first used it to describe their split back in 2014. But there was plenty of backlash to “conscious uncoupling,” as Paltrow explained on the Armchair Expert podcast hosted by Dax Shepard.
Paltrow said the backlash against her use of the term “conscious uncoupling” only made the divorce harder. She said it felt like a “layer of the world turning on us about saying, essentially, we just want to be nice to each other and stay a family.”
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“It was brutal. I already felt like I had no skin on,” Paltrow recalled to Shepard during the podcast episode, going on to explain that the phrase “had been coined in the ’70s, I think. It’s such a beautiful concept. You’re staring down the barrel of a divorce, the worst outcome possible. My parents were married until my dad died. All my best friends… all their parents were married. They all married their college or high school person, [and] they’re still married.”
Paltrow, who has also considered writing a book about “conscious uncoupling”, told Shepard, “I just didn’t come from a world where there was a lot of divorce,” and went on to say that “the most common wound that I heard from children of divorce was, ‘My parents couldn’t be in the same room and couldn’t be friends. It took three years, it took 18 years, it took — God forbid — the death of a close family member for them to sit at the same table.'”
Paltrow said she was determined to find a better way to work through the emotions of something like a split, saying, “I just thought, ‘I wonder if there’s a way to circumvent that and go directly to the point where we’re friends and we remember what we loved about each other, and constantly acknowledge that we created these incredible human beings together.”
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Paltrow said she spent hours researching the devastating effects of divorce on children — in hope of providing her children with Martin (Apple, 14, and Moses, 12) a far better experience in the wake of their parents’ split.
“We’re a family, that’s it. We can pretend we’re not, and hate each other … or, [we can] try to reinvent this for ourselves,” she stated.
Was it smooth sailing? Absolutely not. Paltrow said her initial attempts to stay friends with Martin made for a “difficult” process.
“I think at the time, I was in a lot of pain,” she told Shepard “It felt like such a failure to me. It was so hard and I was so worried about my kids.”
Paltrow and Martin were married for 11 years. Paltrow married television producer Brad Falchuk in September 2018. Martin is dating Fifty Shades of Grey actor Dakota Johnson. Despite all the brouhaha over their “conscious uncoupling,” Paltrow and Martin have remained close friends. In fact, Martin even went along for Paltrow and Falchuk’s honeymoon, with other family friends.
In January, Paltrow told Live with Kelly and Ryan hosts Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest, “We just took our honeymoon in the Maldives and we had a big family honeymoon over Christmas.” She added, “So, my new husband and his children, my children, my ex-husband, our best family friends [were all present]. It was a very modern honeymoon.”
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