Goldie Hawn has revealed why she and long-term partner Kurt Russell have never gotten married.
The actress, 77, spoke candidly about her relationship with Russell, who she’s been dating since 1983, during a recent interview withCNN. When broadcaster Chris Wallace asked her why she wasn’t married, she responded: “Why should we be? Isn’t that a better question?”
When Wallace posed the question again, Hawn acknowledged that she and Russell had been in separate marriages that ultimately ended in divorce. The Death Becomes Her star has two ex-husbands, Bill Hudson and Gus Trikonis, while Russell was previously married to Season Hubley.
“We have been married, and when it doesn’t work out, it ends up to be big business,” she said. “It’s always ugly.”
She then reflected on the concept of divorce, before listing out some of the concerns she’d have if she got divorced a third time.
“Somebody actually has to take a look and say: ‘How many divorces actually are fun? How many divorces actually don’t cost money? How many divorces actually make you hate the person more than you did before? How many divorces have hurt children?’” Hawn added.
While Wallace claimed that she and Russell have “been together 40 years” and “are not going to get divorced”, Hawn responded: “How did you know that then?” referring to the early years of her relationship.
The Overboard star added that, because she’s not married, she gets to choose if she wants to be with her partner every single day. “I like the idea that I can wake up in the morning and make decisions every day if I want to be here,” she said.
As she described how “hard” it can be to make a relationship work, she also shared that, by not being married, she and her partner have maintained their “independent thinking”.
“There’s all kinds of hurdles we go through. There’s things that we believe in, things we don’t believe in, we agree on,” she said. “So I think ultimately staying independent with independent thinking is important, so you can hold on to yourself, and you can actually have that feeling.”
Hawn got married to Trikonis in 1969, before they divorced in 1976. She then married Hudson, before separating in 1982 after six years of marriage. The former couple share two adult children, Oliver Hudson, 46, and Kate Hudson, 43.
Since then, the actress has been in a relationship with Russell, who she shares a 36-year-old son with. Meanwhile, Russell shares his son, Boston, 43, with ex-wife, Hubley.
This isn’t the first time that Hawn has shared her candid thoughts about marriage. During an interview on ITV’s Loose Women in 2015, Hawn first said that she didn’t want to get married again, following her divorce from Hudson.
“I would have been long divorced if I’d been married,” she said, as reported by Hello! “Marriage is an interesting psychological thing. If you need to feel bound to someone, then it’s important to be married.”
She added: “If you have independence, if you have enough money and sense of independence and you like your independence, there’s something psychological about not being married because it gives you the freedom to make decisions one way or the other.”
Earlier this year, Russell also shared his response to the “constant” questions that he and Hawn get about marriage. During an interview with Variety in March, Russell recalled how he and Hawn teased the idea in 1989, while presenting the award for Best Director at the Oscars. After the event, fans thought that their banter about marriage meant that they were really getting hitched.
“At that time, we constantly got asked: ‘When are you going to get married? Why aren’t you married?’” he recalled. “And we were like: ‘Why does anybody care about that?’ We’d asked our kids if they cared about it. They didn’t. We didn’t.”
