The actress opened up about how her fiancé 'demands a certain level of intimacy and communication' that she's never before been comfortable providing in previous relationships.
Gwyneth Paltrow is getting candid about her emotionally mature relationship with fiance Brad Falchuck and her struggles with romantic insecurity throughout her dating life.
The actress and Goop co-founder recently sat down for a conversation in the Sunday Times with relationship expert Esther Perel, where the two discussed how couples can stay strong and last long.
During the lengthy conversation, Perel asked Paltrow about the couples she knows who have been an inspiration to her in her current relationship with the American Horror Story producer. According to the Oscar-winning actress, nearly everyone in her circle of friends has managed to keep the spark alive in their unions -- except her.
"I’m actually the only one in my life who got divorced," she shared. "This used to feel like a failure -- it took me a while to reframe that divorce isn’t a failure."
Paltrow was previously married to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin for more than 10 years before the pair announced that they had separated -- a decision they famously referred to as "conscious uncoupling." They have remained close friends and dedicated co-parents to their two children -- 13-year-old daughter, Apple, and 12-year-old son, Moses.
According to Paltrow, she's had a long history of dating men who she knew would have a difficult time being intimate, in an unconscious attempt to shift the blame of the relationship's collapse off of herself.
"In the past, I’ve been in relationships with men who had intimacy issues, so I could be, like, 'I’m fine, I’m ready to do this,' and let myself think he’s the one with the problem," she explained. "In a way, some of the relationships were designed to keep me out of intimacy."
"Now, for the first time, I feel I’m in an adult relationship that is sometimes uncomfortable, because he sort of demands a certain level of intimacy and communication that I haven’t been held to before," she added. "What came up in the first couple of years of our relationship was how incapable I was in this realm, how I feared intimacy and communication."
The 45-year-old actress has been in a number of high-profile romances throughout her career, including a failed engagement to Brad Pitt and a three-year on-and-off relationship with Ben Affleck, before she began dating Martin in 2002.
"If you look at life like a pie chart, the romantic slice is where all the shit comes out. I’ve always felt that I’m a good friend, mother, daughter, sister, boss, co-worker -- but that I was most broken in that romantic slice," she said. "I had two typical types of relationships: one where I was constantly chasing and trying to win someone over, and one where I was put off by the person’s capacity for the relationship -- and those relationships were very short-lived."
"In a lot of those relationships, I wasn’t particularly in love with the person," she continued. "It was more about 'Why don’t they like me? What’s wrong with me?' I think my desire to overachieve in part comes from this pattern."
Paltrow added that she often feels she had to be "extra, extra good at something in order to be worth anything."
Paltrow and Falchuk, who began dating in 2014 after meeting on the set of Glee, revealed in January that they'd gotten engaged. Check out the video below to hear more about the happy couple.
RELATED CONTENT:
