Opening up. Busy Philipps candidly spoke about the reason she had contemplating divorcing her husband, Marc Silverstein.
Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar, the former Busy Tonight host revealed that she was dissatisfied with how unequal their parenting duties had become. “My thinking was that if I leave, at least then maybe I’d get two days off a week,” Philipps, 40, told the magazine on Thursday, October 3.
“I understand that I’m in a place of privilege, and even if I left Marc and I’d been super down on my luck, there was a version of life that I could have made work for me and my daughters,” she continued. “This is not the reality for many women.”
In this same interview, Silverstein explained to Harper’s Bazaar why he initially abstained from parenting responsibilities. “I like being good at stuff,” the 48-year-old filmmaker said. “And I didn’t feel like I was good [in the home], so I stayed away.”
When Philipps confronted Silverstein with the possibility of divorce, he saw the moment as an opportunity for improvement. “I realized that deep happiness comes from my family and once I figured out what I could bring to the table, things changed. I wanted to do more,” he added.
The Cougar Town alum, for her part, recalled her husband’s response to her inquiry. “Marc was like, ‘I’ll do anything,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘Okay, then do everything. Because I have done it all, all by myself, and I’m done, dude.’”
Philipps also noted that she “was fully out the door” and “wasn’t expecting anything from him, but what we ended up doing was creating our own system.”
In Philipps 2018 memoir, This Will Only Hurt a Little, the actress detailed the factors that led her to ask Silverstein for a divorce in December 2016. She revealed that “things hadn’t been great” in their marriage for “a while.”
“There was a disconnect,” she wrote. “He didn’t let me talk when we were out with friends. Or worse, when it was just us, he didn’t speak to me at all. I’d started to do a test when we were alone in the car together, where I wouldn’t say anything until he did, just to see how long it would take him to talk to me.”
The Freaks and Geeks alum continued, “Some days we rode the whole way in silence. All those years of feeling so alone had started to add up. I’d just assumed that was what marriage was: two people being mildly miserable next to one another.”
Philipps and Silverstein wed in 2007. They are the parents of daughters Birdie, 11, and Cricket, 6.
