“Say you had a really nasty divorce and then you hear this idea that, ‘It doesn’t have to be done this way,” she explained. “I think implicit learning is like, ‘Oh, f–k. They’re saying I did something wrong.’ Which, of course, was not the intention, but that makes sense to me. That’s not a nice thing to contemplate, so I do understand why it was so personal for people.”
This isn’t the first time Gwyneth, who’s married to Brad Falchuk, has reflected on her relationship with the phrase. In fact, she previously admitted it wasn’t her and Chris who coined the combination, but instead that she learned of it through her former therapist—and she didn’t warm right away to the idea.
“The term sounded a bit full of itself, painfully progressive and hard to swallow,” she noted in her 2022 essay to British Vogue. “I was intrigued, less by the phrase, but by the sentiment. Was there a world where we could break up and not lose everything? Could we be a family, even though we were not a couple? We decided to try.”
