Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for J/P Haitian Relief Organization(LONDON) — Six years ago, Gwyneth Paltrow — the actress and lifestyle guru who made very personal-smelling candles famous — famously described her split from Coldplay’s Chris Martin as a “conscious uncoupling.”
In a new feature in British Vogue, Paltrow looks back at when she knew their 2003 marriage was done, and how the couple’s unique relationship has progressed since.
She explained she knew they were done on a 38th birthday trip to Tuscany, “I don’t recall when it happened, exactly. But I knew — despite long walks and longer lie-ins, big glasses of Barolo and hands held — my marriage was over.”
Paltrow recalled that “it felt almost involuntary, like the ring of a bell…cannot be undone…I tried to…push it far down….But I knew it. It was in my bones.”
As for what came next, the actress said, “I started to wonder, as impossible as it sounded, whether there was a way we could continue to feel the structure of our family on some level. Could we…still eat meals together? Vacation, even? Could we find levity and laugh?”
Paltrow says, “I had never heard of the phrase ‘conscious uncoupling.’ Frankly, the term sounded a bit full of itself, painfully progressive and hard to swallow…”
Turns out, the public felt the same way. “I never could have anticipated what came next,” Paltrow said. “The public’s surprise gave way quickly to…a strange combination of mockery and anger…”
But six years on, Paltrow now says the world has caught up. “Instead of people approaching me with, ‘Why did you say that?,’ they now approach me with, ‘How do you do that?'”
The uncoupled pair co-parent their two children: daughter Apple Martin, 16, and son Moses, 14.
In 2018, Paltrow married TV writer and producer Brad Falchuk.
By Stephen Iervolino
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