At long last, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Falchuk have confirmed their engagement.
"We feel incredibly lucky to have come together at this juncture in our lives, when our collective successes and failures can serve as building blocks for a healthy and happy relationship," Paltrow and Falchuk said in a joint statement Monday (via ABC's Good Morning America). The couple announced their engagement in Goop's Sex and Love issue, out Tuesday.
Why did Paltrow decide to get remarried? "Personally, at midlife, I have tried to accept how complex romantic love can be," she said. "I have decided to give it a go again, not only because I believe I have found the man I was meant to be with, but because I have accepted the soul-stretching, pattern-breaking opportunities that (terrifyingly) are made possible by intimacy."
Paltrow met Falchuk on the set of Glee, shortly after her "conscious uncoupling" from Coldplay's Chris Martin in 2014. Rumors of an engagement to Falchuk began circulating in November 2017, though neither star confirmed the news until today. "Gwyneth and Chris are great friends and on very good terms," a source told E! News late last month. "They only want the best for one another and are very supportive. They have moved on from being married into this new phase of their life. It's unconventional, but it works. They made a commitment to always put their kids first and do what's best for them and that's exactly what they are doing."
"Brad fits in well with the family, too, and they are all comfortable together," the source said, noting that Martin and his two kids with Paltrow like him. "He is very easygoing and a fun guy." (This will also be the second marriage for Falchuk, who has two children with Suzanne Bukinik.)
"I'm actually the only one in my life who got divorced," Paltrow says in Goop's Sex and Love issue. "This used to feel like a failure; it took me a while to reframe that divorce isn't a failure."
For most of her adult life, Paltrow says, "I had two typical types of relationships: one where I was constantly chasing and trying to win someone over, and one where I was put off by the person's capacity for the relationship—and those relationships were very short-lived." For the first time in her life, Paltrow feels as if she's "in an adult relationship that is sometimes very uncomfortable—because he sort of demands a certain level of intimacy and communication that I haven't been held to before. What came up in the first couple of years of our relationship was how incapable I was in this realm—how I feared intimacy and communication."
Paltrow previously told Net-a-Porter's The EDIT that skeptics were "coming around" to the idea of "conscious uncoupling" with an ex. "I wanted to turn my divorce into a positive. What if I didn't blame the other person for anything and held myself 100 percent accountable? What if I checked my own s--t at the door and put my children first? And reminded myself about the things about my ex-husband that I love, and fostered the friendship?" she told the magazine. "What I put myself through to get there was the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life."
"I've had an extraordinary life, where things have happened in a huge way—huge success, huge joy, huge pain, huge loss. And the reason I feel happy today is because I've milked the f--k out of every opportunity. I haven't made one mistake that I haven't used as a stepping stone to get somewhere else," the actress continued. "I'm ruthless when it comes to using the hard things."
Paltrow never shied away from discussing the new dynamics of her so-called "modern family," either. "I think that I'm very lucky in that I have such a willing partner in agreeing with, and teaching me, as much as I taught him. And bringing to me, as much as I brought to him, ideas about how to do it in a really gentle way, so it would be really gentle for Chris and myself," she told Red magazine two years ago. "We loved each other very much, and we still do love each other, and we have these two beautiful children together. I thought, 'I wonder if there's a way where we don't have to do that to our kids and we can just carry on having family dinners.'"
The actress said she and Martin broke up a year before they announced it, giving them time "to work through" their feelings. "It really has not been easy for me at times; I'm sure it's not been easy for him," she confessed. "When we said we're going to put the children first, we meant it."