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David Arquette: Why Courteney Cox and I Split

David Arquette: Why Courteney Cox and I Split
David Arquette and Courteney Cox on set of ‘Scream 4’ Moviestore/Shutterstock

A day after announcing that he and Courteney Cox are calling it quits after 11 years of marriage, David Arquette phoned Howard Stern‘s Sirius Satellite radio show Tuesday morning to set the record straight.

“It breaks my heart,” he said of their decision to separate, adding that he is “not the one that called this [separation] in order. “I’ve been begging Courteney to get back with me,” he later added. “She’s conflicted too.”

Related: PHOTOS: Sad splits

So what went wrong?

During the very candid conversation, Arquette, 39, implied that Cox, 46, grew tired of his kooky ways.

For their 11th wedding anniversary this past June, she bought him a motorcycle. “She said to me, ‘I don’t want to be your mother anymore,'” he recalled. “And I appreciated that about her … She didn’t want to tell me, ‘Don’t do that.’ She didn’t want to nag me anymore.”

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Without elaborating, Arquette said that he had started doing things that would “embarrass” his wife publicly. (He recalled she once told him not to get any more tattoos.)

His kooky behavior probably seemed “charming” to her when they first met on the set of Scream in 1996, he said. “But that stuff starts getting old.”

By the time they started filming Scream 4 in Ann Arbor, Mich., this summer, he said he was “feeling distance.” He said they hadn’t been intimate “in a month or so.” (His wife is “real and emotional… She’s an emotional woman and if it doesn’t feel right, then she doesn’t feel like bonding in that way,” he said.)

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He said he remembers telling her, “‘If you’re not my mother anymore, I am going to be myself.'”

He said he found himself going out with the younger castmates and having fun. “She wants me to be who I am,” he said of Cox. “She needs to make that decision if this is person she wants to spend her life with or not.” Cox also has had “her issues,” Arquette said. “She tries to take on everybody’s problems. She’s the mother to everyone. That’s why she doesn’t want to be the mother to me anymore.”

He denied that anyone cheated.

He confirmed that he has gotten intimate with L.A. cocktail waitress Jasmine Waltz, but he stressed, “I am a single man” — and they are no longer together.

Related: PHOTOS: Controversial couples

As for reports this past spring that Cox was getting cozy with her Cougar Town costar, Brian Van Holt, Arquette said he confronted her and she denied an affair.

“I do believe her … I truly don’t think she ever had an affair,” he said, adding that if anything perhaps they formed an “emotional” bond.

Asked if she ordered the separation because she wanted to see other people, Arquette said, “Maybe. I don’t know.”

How is daughter Coco coping?

When they recently broke the news to her, they took her to the beach and had a picnic.

He said they explained to her that “‘we’re grown-ups .. and grown-ups need to figure out their lives.'”

“‘Are you guys getting divorced?'” he recalled her asking.

“‘No, we’re taking time off to know … what we want out of our mate better,'” he remembered telling her.

Arquette wanted to stress that he and Cox are “still tight. I love her with all my heart and she loves me with all her heart … We’re trying to get real with each other, real with ourselves.

“I want her to be happy,” he later said, “more than I was happiness for myself.”

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