Ashton Kutcher has opened up about feeling like a “failure” following his divorce from ex-wife Demi Moore.
The 44-year-old actor shared new details about his past relationship with the 60-year-old Ghost star in a new cover story for Esquire, including becoming a step-father to Moore’s three daughters and suffering a miscarriage not long after the two started dating.
“I love kids. I wouldn’t have gotten married to a woman that had three kids if I didn’t love kids,” Kutcher told the magazine. “The idea of having another kid would have been incredible.”
In 2019, Demi Moore revealed in her memoir Inside Out that she became pregnant in 2003, two years before she and Kutcher were married. However, the then 42-year-old lost the child about six months into her pregnancy.
“Losing a kid that you think you’re going to have, and that close to thinking you’re going to have a kid, is really, really painful,” Kutcher said. “Everyone deals with that in different ways.”
Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore first began dating in 2003 after they met at a dinner party. Moore was in her 40s at the time, while Kutcher was 25 years old. The two were married in 2005 and divorced in 2013.
During their relationship, Kutcher told Esquire that he “stayed home and took care of the kids” when Moore would go on location to film.
“I was 26, bearing the responsibility of an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 12-year-old,” he said, referring to Moore’s three daughters, Rumer Willis, Tallulah Willis, and Scout LaRue Willis. “That’s how some teen parents must experience their twenties.”
Despite the challenge of becoming a step-father in his twenties, Kutcher said he still maintains a relationship with each of Moore’s daughters. However, looking back now, he admitted that the experience was “a lot”.
In her tell-all memoir, Moore wrote that the loss of their baby at six months pregnant left her “empty, desperate, confused. . . . I really lost sight of everything that was right in front of me, which was the family that I had.”
Following the miscarriage, she and Kutcher tried for several years to conceive again through IVF treatment. But the GI Jane star ultimately began drinking again after being sober for nearly two decades. In an interview with The New York Times, Moore revealed that she blamed herself for the loss of their baby.
The Indecent Proposal star reportedly saw her relationship with Kutcher as a “do-over”, writing that she felt she could “just go back in time and experience what it was like to be young, with him — much more so than I’d ever been able to experience it when I was actually in my twenties.”
Among the revelations in her memoir were accusations that Kutcher had cheated on Moore during their marriage. Moore claimed the two “had brought in a third party into our relationship” which “blurred the lines” and “justified” his alleged infidelity. She wrote that the threesomes left her with feelings of “shame.”
Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore announced their split in 2011, finalising their divorce in 2013. In a statement, Moore said at the time that she was doing it with “great sadness and a heavy heart,” adding that “as a woman, a mother and a wife, there are certain values and vows that I hold sacred, and it is in this spirit that I have chosen to move forward with my life”.
Speaking to Esquire, Kutcher opened up about feeling like a “failure” after their divorce.
“Nothing makes you feel like a failure like divorce,” he said. “Divorce feels like a wholesale fucking failure. You failed at marriage.”
However, the entrepreneur admitted that “for whatever reason, I had to have that experience.”
These days, Kutcher is happily married to his former co-star, Mila Kunis. The two first met while playing on-again, off-again couple Jackie Burkhart and Michael Kelso in the sitcom That ‘70s Show, which aired from 1998 to 2006. Although, the two didn’t start dating until 2012.
Shortly after their engagement in 2014, the couple welcomed their first child – daughter Wyatt – in October that year. They were married in July 2015, and went on to welcome a second baby – son Dimitri – in November 2016.
“The thing about Mila that made our relationship accelerate was that I had always admired her,” Kutcher told Esquire. “Her talents, her skills, her gifts. But I knew that she didn’t need me. And she knew that I didn’t need her.”
He also joked it was easy to spark a romance with his longtime friend because they “already knew all of each other’s dirt,” adding: “My wife is so much cooler than me.”
Meanwhile, after the release of his ex-wife’s memoir in 2019, Kutcher responded to many of its shocking revelations with a single tweet: “I was about to push the button on a really snarky tweet. Then I saw my son, daughter and wife and I deleted it.”
