Gwyneth Paltrow: ‘Divorce taught me so much about myself’

Gwyneth Paltrow’s painful divorce from Coldplay singer Chris Martin taught the actress more about herself than anything else in her life.

The Oscar winner said she never thought divorce would be a possibility for her when she and the Yellow singer wed in 2003, but the “conscious uncoupling” offered her huge clues as to the type of person she was and the woman she wanted to be.

“I’ve learned so much from something I wanted least in the world,” Paltrow told fellow actress Anna Faris during an appearance on her Unqualified podcast.

I never wanted to get divorced. I never wanted to not be married to the father of my kids, theoretically,” she went on.

“I have learned more about myself through that process than I could have imagined,” Paltrow mused, noting that because she focused on accountability, she was able to build a stronger relationship with her second husband, writer and producer Brad Falchuk, who she wed in 2018.

“We were friends first for a long time and once I was like, ‘Are we going to date? Is this happening?’ I was scared because (Falchuk) is a person who demands presence and intimacy and communication in a way that I just didn’t know how to (do),” Paltrow reflected.

“I like to fight by shutting down… I leave the room. And he’s like… ‘Absolutely not. We are sitting down and we are figuring this out’,” she shared.

“He demands that I am honest with myself in a way that is hard for me but which really helps me grow. I think I recognized his amazing qualities,” Paltrow said, adding: “It was like being with some kind of jiujitsu master, where they’re like, ‘I’m going to make you see your own stuff so you can win and advance’.”