Gwyneth Paltrow Explained Why She Used "Conscious Uncoupling" In Her Divorce Statement And Opened Up About The Backlash
"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.' It was brutal."
Back in 2014, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin announced that they were divorcing after 10 years of marriage.
However, there was one part of the divorce statement that really got people talking — the fact that Gwyneth used the term "consciously uncoupling" to describe the split.
In fact, the whole thing very swiftly became a big joke, with people ridiculing the fact that Gwyneth had used such a term rather than simply saying the pair were divorcing.
At first I thought Conscious Uncoupling was going to be the name announcement for their third child.
gwyneth paltrow and chris martin having a 'conscious uncoupling' is the whitest breakup of all time
Well, five years on, Gwyneth has finally revealed that she chose to use the term because she felt a "failure" when her marriage broke down, and it softened the blow of facing a divorce.
Speaking to Dax Shepard on his podcast, Armchair Expert, Gwyneth explained: "It 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, they’re still married. I just didn’t come from a world where there was a lot of divorce.”
She also said the term represented being able to circumvent all the pain and anger of a divorce, allowing her and Chris to become friends quicker.
She said: “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.' 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.'”
And Gwyneth went on to reveal that the backlash to the divorce statement felt "brutal."
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She said: "I think at the time I was in a lot of pain. It felt like such a failure to me. It was so hard and I was so worried about my kids. 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.' It was brutal. I already felt like I had no skin on."