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Ten years ago, Gwyneth said she wanted an amicable divorce. Now her ex is marrying Dakota Johnson…
THEY’RE SOMETHING OF a quiet fixture when it comes to Hollywood couples, and yet, when news broke that Dakota Johnson, 34, and Chris Martin, 47, were engaged, there was still a flurry of surprise. And while it soon emerged that the couple – who’ve been dating for six years – may have been engaged for some time, and that the real story was an impending wedding, the fact that there was no big social media announcement only amplified their understated nature amid a sea of PDA showponies.
It’s characteristic for Martin, 47, to do things differently when it comes to relationships; the Coldplay star is, after all, the man who unleashed the infamous concept of ‘conscious uncoupling’ on the world 10 years ago. In a statement, published on his then-wife Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website in March 2014, the pair announced the end of their relationship. ‘It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate,’ Martin and Paltrow said. ‘We are… and always will be a family and, in many ways, we are closer than we have ever been… We hope that as we consciously uncouple and coparent, we will be able to continue in the same manner.’
And so, conscious uncoupling was born. At the time, the response was a mixture of horror and outrage. The appetite for nasty, drama-filled starry splits was high, fuelled by huge tabloid sales, which were riding the wave of the likes of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s 2005 divorce and Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears’ break-up. So when faced with an A-list couple who claimed not to hate one another’s guts, the collective consciousness was one of confusion. Paltrow and Martin were trailblazers – divorce-fluencers, perhaps.
Indeed, she and Martin have become the blueprint for being ‘one big happy family’, maintaining a close friendship while they co-parented Apple and Moses, and welcoming one another’s new partners (producer Brad Falchuk, whom Palt
