When your parents get divorced, they just make terrible mistakes, and they fight, and you see that adults have very real flaws. I think my instinct was, “Oh my God, maybe they’re wrong about all sorts of stuff they’ve been telling me. If my mom thinks my dad’s the devil, and if my dad is enraged at my mom, then maybe some of this advice they’ve been giving me is wrong about things. I don’t think he’s the devil. He’s very nice to me.” It just completely threw me.
It’s important that you believe your parents, like they know what they’re talking about, and there’s a comfort knowing they’re sane. When you see them at a terrible moment, at their worst, and they’re screaming at each other and it’s really madness for a couple of years, my first reaction was, “I don’t believe anything. I can’t rely on these people because they can’t rely on each other.” They’ve bailed on each other and in some way I felt bailed on, like, “Oh, our whole family isn’t important enough for you to figure out how to get along. One of you is going to leave and I’m going to see the other one randomly.” It was terrible.
RACHAEL HARRIS
I’ve told everybody I know, “Never get divorced.” Work through it, if it’s possible. Divorce was so hard. But over the years, things happen. People grow apart. You know, he’s not here to talk about it, and to tell his side of the story, but I will say that for me, the hardest thing was knowing that it was the right thing to do. Staying was awful. The thought of leaving was hideous and awful, but the thought of staying was worse.
MELISSA ETHERIDGE—MUSICIAN
It was horrible to have a breakup in public. Yes, it was horrible to feel like I let down a whole community because here I was regarded as this—there’s this perfect relationship, I’m out, we have children. That about killed me when I thought, we’re going to divorce and I’ve just shown the world what a gay family looks like and now we’re going to end it. That just about, that broke my heart even more than really losing the relationship because I really needed to be out of that relationship. But just that I felt like I let down so many people, that was difficult.
JUDD APATOW
When your parents get divorced, life collapses suddenly. “Hey, Judd, could you come down in the living room? We need to talk to you for a minute. Mommy is moving out.” You think, “Something like that is going to happen again. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but I better be ready for it.”
Staying ready for it is what detaches you from life. For me, that’s been the great lesson of marriage, and my beautiful wife and beautiful daughters. They will not accept that. Daddy needs to be here, and needs to be happy and connected and present. It forces me to do the work, not be the guy who wants to detach.
CINDY CRAWFORD—MODEL, ENTREPRENEUR, ACTIVIST
I was twenty-six when I got married. I was young. I didn’t think I was young. But I was young.
I was with Richard for six years, but I was only married for two years.
We’re friendly now, but it’s almost like he’s gone back to being “Richard Gere” again, like a stranger, because we don’t really see each other that much.
I think part of the problem in our relationship was that we were a lot of other things, but I don’t know if we were ever friends. Like peers, because I was young and he was Richard Gere. Then as I started growing up and growing into myself, it’s hard to change the dynamic of a relationship once you’re already in it, you know?
I’ve been with my husband Rande now almost twenty-five years and I think why Rande and I really work is that we were friends first. I never pretended to like baseball or meditation or whatever the version is, because I wasn’t trying to win him over.
It’s that thing where you’re on that first date and you’re like, “I love that.” Then six months later they’re like, “Let’s go to the baseball game,” and you’re like, “I hate baseball.” They’re like, “What?”
When you are with a friend you never do that and you really show your flaws from the beginning. I wasn’t trying to impress Rande. We got hooked up. We had to go to a wedding together, but not as dates. He was just chaperoning me because I didn’t want to go alone. We met and he didn’t want to really go out with me because he was dating another model. My friend whose wedding it was said, “Well, you can go with one of these three guys.” I knew the other two and I was like, “I’m not going with them, so I’ll take this unknown Door Number Three.” It was Rande, but he was late picking me up. I was like, “You’re late.” I was yelling at him the first time I met him, which was good because then when I yelled at him later on, he’d already seen that side of me.
TOM GREEN—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, TALK SHOW HOST
When I got cancer was exactly the exact same time that Drew Barrymore and I started dating. I was doing the movie Charlie’s Angels. We lived together for about two years and dated for two and a half years and it was great for a good chunk of that. Then it wasn’t great and then we broke up.
Marc
She seems like a pretty nice person.
Tom
Yeah.
Marc
In general.
Tom
Nice enough to marry for five months, at least.
Marc
I’ve been married twice, man.
Tom
I think the thing is, you’ve got to imagine what would it be like for you—What’s your first wife’s name?
Marc
Kim.
Tom
What would it be like for you if every time you left your house, every day, for the rest of your life, between five and ten people, between the time you left your house and got back home, came up to you and said, “Hey, how’s Kim?”
“You talked to Kim lately?”
“Oh, I remember, you’re with Kim.”
“Weren’t you married to that Kim?”
Welcome to my life.
The tendency is to want to just rant about it. It’s just so not really a viable option to go around ranting about why it went wrong. First of all, I’m sure she has a completely different opinion about why it went wrong. We don’t really have any relationship anymore. I haven’t talked to her in probably seven or eight years. We were living together, we were married. When she left the house that day, when we decided to get a divorce, I have never seen her since. That was over ten years ago but still, her name gets brought up every day.
It’s an odd thing. You want to go, “Oh, this is what went wrong and this has happened and she did this, she did that, blah, blah, blah.” Then you just sound like some jerk walking around complaining about America’s sweetheart. I just chose to say nothing until now.
NICK GRIFFIN—COMEDIAN, WRITER
People ask, “How is she?” I go, “I have no idea, literally.”