Gwyneth Paltrow breaks silence on her divorce from Chris Martin

Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t set out to create a pop-culture catchphrase when she divorced Chris Martin. She was simply trying to figure out how to keep her family from falling apart.

Speaking on the Friends Keep Secrets podcast, the actress recalled how she and Martin decided to approach their 2014 split differently, especially for their two children, Apple, 22, and Moses, 20.

“We really sat down and thought, like, is there a way that we could do this?” she said.

Paltrow, 53, turned to friends whose parents had divorced, expecting them to talk about the breakup itself. Instead, she heard stories about years of awkward family gatherings and lingering tension.

“They said the worst part was like my parents, you know, my dad used to drop me off at the end of the driveway. Like it was so tense at my birthday parties, you know, they never ate dinner in the same room until my college graduation, and it caused me so much pain. So I was like, how could we not do that?,” she continued.

That led Paltrow and Martin to work with a therapist and commit to putting their children first.

“So Chris and I had this therapist that was really brilliant, and he sort of introduced us to the concept and we just made a commitment to really put the kids first and so what that meant was to stay a family even though we weren’t a couple,” she said.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing. During one tense Sunday brunch after the family moved to Los Angeles, Paltrow and Martin stepped outside, hugged, fist-bumped and decided not to let things “go really off the rails.”

Ironically, the phrase later came back to bite Paltrow. She previously revealed that the backlash surrounding “conscious uncoupling” even cost her a movie role.

“I think the distributor was like, this might be too hot to touch,” she recalled in January. “So that was great because I was getting a divorce and then I got fired. So it was so awesome,” she added.