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In a perfect world, your personal life wouldn’t seep into your job, but also, a perfect world seems boring. Gwyneth Paltrow saw how her divorce from Chris Martin affected her professional life with more than just a prenup. She told Amy Poehler on the Good Hang podcast that, after the bad PR from being “conscious uncoupled,” she was soon fired from a movie role. “I was supposed to do a movie at one point and it was like right after the conscious uncoupling thing with Chris, and there was a lot of harsh stuff in the press,” she explained. “I think the distributor was like, this might be too hot to touch. So that was great because I was getting a divorce and then I got fired off. So it was so awesome.”
Ten years after her divorce from Martin, she understands why people felt so hurt or defensive by her use of the phrase “conscious uncoupling” when describing a divorce. “Say you had had a really nasty divorce, or your parents had had a really nasty divorce. And then you hear this idea that like, it doesn’t have to be done this way,” she told Poehler. “I think the implicit learning is like, ‘Oh, fuck. Like, they’re saying I did something wrong.’ That makes sense to me, like, ‘Oh no, is the inference that I mess someone up.’ Like, that’s not a nice thing to contemplate. So I do understand why it was so personal for people.”
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