Kate Hudson took a cold-turkey break from men in her thirties, and it turned out to be one of the best things she's ever done.
"I took a full year off," Hudson shared during a recent appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast with Alex Cooper.
"I was at that place where I was like, 'I don't want to keep repeating any patterns anymore,'" she explained. "I have a great therapist who was like, 'I can help you, but you have to it.'"
To make this work, she had to stop flirting, texting men, or giving them her number—things that she had previously loved to do.
"It was strangely empowering, because it got very uncomfortable for me in the beginning—in the first couple months," Hudson said.
"Because we were going through various specific types of therapy, it was really about figuring out certain things that were happening with me. And then I had this one sort of breakthrough that was very emotional that I don't think I would have been able to access if I had any distraction. So like, it allowed me to see things much more clearly."
Around the six-month mark, Hudson no longer felt very interested in her phone, or in flirtation.
And then, around the year mark, when her therapist gave her the go-ahead to flirt again, the actress had kind of forgotten how. When men started texting her again, "I didn't have the same attachment to it anymore," she explained. "It just went away. ... It didn't have that same, like, pull."
After this experience, she also started being attracted to different kinds of men than before, and was extremely happy being single for over three years during that time.
"If I didn't do that, I would never have ended up with Danny [Fujikawa, her fiancé]," she said.
"Because Danny, like, he's just such a good man, and I'm not sure I was attracted to the good man. I mean, I was attracted to good men, but like, you know, the uncomplicated kind of—I liked a feisty, wild type—whereas Danny has that in him, his values are very sturdy and he's such a lovely person, and I would never—I think—have allowed that in if I didn't take those three years of just being so happy in my life alone."
Hudson and Fujikawa have been together since 2016. They share daughter Rani Rose, born in 2018, and got engaged in 2021. Hudson is also mom to Ryder, 20, and Bingham, 13, from previous relationships.
