Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to "reinvent" divorce when she split from Chris Martin in 2014.
The 46-year-old actress and the Coldplay frontman – who have daughter Apple, 14, and son Moses, 12, together – famously dubbed their break-up as a "conscious uncoupling", and Gwyneth has now said the phrase was coined as a way to try and skip past the pain of divorce and move straight to a place where she could be friends with the singer.
She said: "I just thought, ‘I wonder if there’s a way to circumvent that and just go directly to the point where we’re friends.’ We’re family, that’s it. We can pretend we’re not, and hate each other … or, let’s try to reinvent this for ourselves."
The ‘Iron Man’ actress then received backlash online for her choice of words, and she says the criticism impacted her negatively because she was already "in a lot of pain" from the split itself.
Gwyneth added during an appearance on Dax Shepard’s ‘Armchair Podcast’: "I was in a lot of pain. It was so difficult. It felt like such a failure to me. It was so hard and I was so worried about my kids. Then there was this whole other layer of the world turning on us.
"Sometimes I’ve said things and it’s been too early in the culture, or whatever. [I may have] triggered a lot of people who were the sons and daughters of acrimonious divorces, or people in the middle of acrimonious divorces."
But despite the backlash, the former couple seem to have stayed true to their promise to remain close, as Gwyneth recently invited the ‘Yellow’ hitmaker and their children to join her on her honeymoon with new husband Brad Falchuck.
In January, she explained: "We just took our honeymoon in the Maldives and we had a big family honeymoon over Christmas."
Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to ‘reinvent’ divorce with Chris Martin split
