Gwyneth Paltrow has shared her candid thoughts on breakups and revealed why she’s still on good terms with all of her exes.
The 50-year-old actor took to Instagram on Friday to reflect on her relationships during a Q&A session. On her Instagram Story, she answered a question from a fan asking her if she’s still friends with her former partners.
In response, Paltrow said she was “pretty much” friends with them all and shared her stance on “conscious uncoupling,” which is when two exes end their relationship in a friendly way.
“I really believe in conscious uncoupling,” she wrote in her story, via Yahoo! “When you spend meaningful time with someone, it’s nice to have it morph into friendship. I don’t want to have bad blood with anyone, ever (if I can help it).”
Back in 2014, Paltrow first used the breakup term to announce her divorce from Chris Martin after 10 years of marriage. The former couple share two children, Apple, 18, and Moses, 16.
“We have always conducted our relationship privately, and we hope that as we consciously uncouple and coparent, we will be able to continue in the same manner,” read the statement on Paltrow’s website, Goop, at the time.
Goop defines conscious coupling as “the ability to understand that every irritation and argument within a relationship was a signal to look inside ourselves and identify a negative internal object that needed healing”.
During a 2019 episode of Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, the Iron Man star said that the term allowed her and Martin to bypass the pain of divorce and focus on being parents to their children.
“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,” she explained.
Throughout the last year, she has continued to praise her exes. In July, she took to Instagram to share that she was “very happy” for her ex-boyfriend Ben Affleck following his wedding to Jennifer Lopez.
In a joint interview for Goop in June, Paltrow and ex-fiancée, Brad Pitt, expressed how “lovely” it has been that they’ve stayed friends over the years and that they “love” each other. The actors were together from 1994 to 1997, before calling off their engagement.
Paltrow, who got remarried to TV writer Brad Falchuk in 2018, also revealed that her husband not only “respects” her friendship with Pitt, but he also approves of her belief in “conscious uncoupling”.
“Probably one of the things that he likes about me is that I believe in conscious uncoupling, whether you’re uncoupling with a coworker, a spouse, or a boyfriend,” The Avengers star told Entertainment Tonight in October.
She went on to detail what positive things can come out of a breakup, adding: “I really do believe that if you’ve invested in somebody -- and of course there are exceptions -- to amputate that relationship [shows that] maybe you’re not then fully letting the full lesson reveal itself and the healing happen.”
