Having “Young Kids…Just Ruins the Relationship”: Gwyneth Paltrow Jokes About the Challenge of Having Babies

Gwyneth Paltrow and Katy Perry, two women-about-town, got together to chat, and we can all eavesdrop on their conversation right here on The Goop Podcast.

What were those two old so-and-sos talking about? Kids, mostly! They both have them. Perry is raising her toddler, Daisy, with her partner, Orlando Bloom. Bloom also has a son, Flynn, with Miranda Kerr. Paltrow has Apple, 18, and Moses, 16, with her ex-husband, Chris Martin, plus two teenage children from her husband Brad Falchuk’s previous marriage. Martin and Paltrow’s divorce was finalized in 2016, two years after she wrote her famous “conscious uncoupling” treatise.

“It’s hard on a relationship,” Paltrow said. “Like, I’ve looked back now on, like, the data set of parents with young kids, [and] it just ruins the relationship…It’s really hard!”

Perry, who is in the middle of it, was quick to say that it’s not impossible to have both a healthy relationship and a baby. “I think if both of the people in the relationship are willing to do the work, then it’s going to be so much easier,” Perry said. “If one person thinks that they don’t have any work to do, then it’s going to be really challenging.”

Paltrow added a lovely and oddly sad sentiment: “I never felt lonely again after I had [Apple], and I had felt profoundly lonely in my life.”

Listen, is this revelatory material? No. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that raising a helpless, weeping puddle of bones is hard, and having a partner who can coparent in a big—even equitable—way is only more helpful for all involved.

What’s so great about Paltrow’s sound bite is that it’s such a perfectly Gwyneth Paltrow thing to say: funny, straightforward, a little provocative, potentially revealing a reality that her partner in conversation is not ready to acknowledge yet, and about a problem that one would think could be solved with the right bank account. That is, you’d think nannies, night nurses, and all the best relationship-saving baby widgets would have been at her and Martin’s disposal all those years ago.

Here, too, the stars are just like us. They have children! They struggle! They get divorced! They occasionally ironically unironically bemoan their children on their podcasts!