'I can see how it would seem weird.'
Gwyneth Paltrow is explaining her friendship with her ex-husband's current girlfriend.
The 47-year-old Goop founder covers the February issue of Harper's Bazaar and opens up about her unlikely friendship with Dakota Johnson, who's currently dating Chris Martin. Paltrow and Martin were married from 2003 to 2016 and share two children, Apple, 15, and Moses, 13.
"I love her," Paltrow says of Johnson, 30. "I can see how it would seem weird because it’s sort of unconventional. But I think, in this case, just having passed through it iteratively, I just adore her."
"I always start to think of the ampersand sign -- what else can you bring in, instead of being resistant to or being made insecure by?" she continues. "There’s so much juice in leaning in to something like that."
As for her relationship with 42-year-old Martin, Paltrow reveals that it's "very rarely" a difficult one.
"It’s not like there’s a finish line: 'Oh, we consciously uncoupled; we’re done,'" she says. "It’s a lifelong commitment to constantly reinvent your relationship with your ex, which you do presumably because you have children together. I don’t see a reason to do it if you don’t have children together. Some people do."
"But I think we put all the hard work in at the beginning. I would say very rarely is it difficult now," Paltrow continues. "We’ve learned how to communicate with each other. We love each other. We laugh. We have the best of each other. It’s really nice. It makes you feel like you don’t have to lose."
Paltrow strives to apply that same positivity to all of her past relationships, revealing that she's friendly with many of her exes -- including Brad Pitt, whom she famously dated from 1994 to 1997.
"One of them is still one of my best friends -- one from high school, Tony Woods," she says. "And I’m friendly with Brad Pitt. I don’t have any really bad blood."
In fact, Paltrow and Pitt remain so friendly that she's able to look fondly back on the '90s fashion-filled photos from their relationship with fondness.
"I love it," she says of seeing snaps from that time. "It’s just so funny to me because now my daughter looks at the ’90s the way I looked at the ’70s."
Though all is well between the exes now, the breakup itself was a hard one. In a video for the magazine, Paltrow looks back on her past covers and remarked on one that came shortly after she and Pitt split.
"This one, gosh, I was only about maybe 24 or 25. Brad Pitt and I had just broken up and I had breakup, like, could not eat," she recalls. "I was really skinny. It was sort of upsetting. But it's a nice picture."
All that is behind her now, though, as Paltrow is happily married to Brad Falchuk, with whom she tied the knot in 2018 and moved in with a year later.
"She's stunning and she's charming and she's completely disarming," Falchuk gushes of his wife to the magazine.
Now with her happy relationships, two children, and successful business ventures, Paltrow has learned to be unapologetically open about herself in both her public and private lives.
"I think I get more and more open as the years go on," she says. "I think that maybe comes in life when the degree to which you’re pretending to be someone else -- or still hoping you’re going to be someone else -- starts to diminish, and you’re like, 'Here I am. Okay. So what?'"
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