Courteney Cox: Single and ready to mingle?
Not exactly. Although the Cougar Town star, 46, initiated a trial separation from husband David Arquette last year, she still hasn't made up her mind about divorcing the troubled star.
"I feel like we've been extremely successful at marriage," Cox tells the April issue of Harper's Bazaar of Arquette, 37, who checked out of rehab in January after some very high-profile meltdowns on The Howard Stern Show and elsewhere.
The unlikely couple wed in 1999 and have a daughter, Coco, 6. "If [the marriage] doesn't work out, I will have huge waves of pain about failing in that department," Cox admits.
"But right now I don't have that because I don't know what the future holds and I guess because I have strong feelings for him."
As for Arquette's shockingly frank confessionals on Stern's show about their sex life and other intimate details, "You can't really get mad at David because he's not a malicious person," Cox muses. "He was dealing with things the best way he could."
But she clarifies: "Don't get me wrong, he was on a show for entertainment. David is smart, and David is also a showman. He knew what he was doing."
The Friends alum explains why she asked for a trial split in the first place.
"The thing is, when you get older, it's more about compatibility than it is about love," she says, noting that she needed "a kind of peace and stillness. I'm kind of all over the place, and I need grounding. I want to be calm. I want to change a lot."
"It's nothing with David," she insists. "It's just what I'm searching for."
Her advice to other couples with marital struggles? "[Be] willing to get real and messy," she says. "I think you can only become stronger people, whether it's together or apart. In the end, everything will be better."
One other talked-about detail regarding the famous couple: Arquette's dalliance with another woman (a cocktail waitress) during their separation. "He absolutely did nothing that wasn't in the boundaries of what we set for our separation, so there's nothing to judge," Cox says. "I may not have known about it, but that's the only difference."
