Now bachelor himself, Chris Harrison knows how difficult it can be to sustain a marriage.
The host of ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette announced May 3 that he and his wife, Gwen, 40, have ended their 18-year marriage. Chris, also 40, opened up about their recent split as a guest co-host on LIVE! With Kelly Wednesday.
“I’m doing great and so is Gwen,” he told host Kelly Ripa, 41. “I’m very proud of the fact that we’ve done it well. We’re the best of friends.”
The former couple — parents to son Joshua, 9, and daughter Taylor, 7 — even spent Tuesday afternoon together. “Yesterday when we went to school to pick up the kids, we were walking across the street together and the crossing guard said, ‘Nice to see you guys together!'” Chris recalled. “And my wife looked at me and was like, ‘The crossing guard knows?’ So yeah, everybody knows.”
Though he’s newly single, Chris has no plans to look for love on The Bachelor like Ben Flajnik and Brad Womack. “I always said that if I was the star of this show, it would be in big trouble, but now I really mean it,” Chris admitted. “If I was the star of this show, we would be in big trouble. I mean, if they can’t do any better than that. . .”
Insiders recently told Us Weekly that the separation “had been coming for a while.” At issue? Distance posed a problem for the L.A.-based Harrisons. With both series in production for several months, the show’s globe-hopping required Chris to be absent often. “It’s not like Gwen can run off to Fiji when she has the kids,” one insider explained.
