When Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin announced in 2014 they were separating after more than a decade of marriage, their joint statement infamously introduced a two-word phrase to the pop-culture vernacular: “conscious uncoupling.”
It feels quaint now to look back on a time before we knew the term — which refers to a relatively amicable breakup or divorce — but at the time, the exes faced a lot of backlash in the media for what was perceived as a self-important way to describe a split. In fact, the response was so negative that Paltrow says she lost a job over it.
The Oscar-winning actress and entrepreneur appears on the latest episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, and the surprising anecdote came when the Saturday Night Live alum asked Paltrow if she’d ever been fired. After sharing a story of losing her gig working at a toy store when she was 12, Paltrow transitioned to the more serious story.
“You know, I was supposed to do a movie at one point, and it was right after the kind of ‘conscious uncoupling’ thing with Chris,” Paltrow told Poehler. “And there was a lot of harsh stuff in the press, and 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, which was awesome,” Paltrow added sarcastically.
The Goop founder explained that she was just trying to find a better way through an incredibly hard time in her life, and the “conscious uncoupling” idea — introduced by sociologist Diane Vaughan back in the 1970s — gave her that framework.
“Say you had a really nasty divorce or your parents had a really nasty divorce, and then you hear this idea that it doesn’t have to be done this way,” Paltrow said of why people had a harsh reaction to the phrase. “I think the implicit learning is like, ‘Oh f—, they’re saying I did something wrong,’ which of course is not the intention. But of course, that makes sense to me. ‘Is the inference that I messed someone up?’ Like, that’s not a nice thing to contemplate. So I do understand why it was so personal for people, because it was. You only see that kind of reaction when it’s personal.”
Martin and Paltrow met and began dating in 2002 and were married the next year. Before their 2014 separation, they had two children together: 21-year-old Apple and 19-year-old Moses.
Watch Paltrow’s full Good Hang interview — with the firing talk starting around the 22-minute mark — below.
