Post-divorce with Chris Pratt, Anna Faris will openly admit that she's struggling with whether marriage is worth it anymore.
"I need to figure out what the purpose is,” the actress said on Monday’s episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. “Is it safety for your children? Is it convention? Is it so other people respect your relationship more? For me, I’m just not quite sure where it fits, especially when it feels so easy to get married, and then there’s like the untangling in terms of the state getting involved.”
The only immediate benefit Faris could name is that marriage makes people take your relationship more seriously. “There is the importance of how other people then treat you as a married man as opposed to a man with a girlfriend. I do think it is important how other people respect a relationship—I’m not saying it’s a good reason, but it is a small benefit of having that label of being married.”
Faris later talked about the pressure she and Pratt felt being a beloved, popular Hollywood couple—and the internet's reaction of "love is dead" after they announced they were separating. “Chris and I did talk about [it]. We got, like on the Twitter feed, yes like ‘Love is dead’ and ‘relationship goals,'” she started.
“I think what we were also guilty of—although we had an unbelievable marriage and we have a great friendship now, we love our son to death, and I’m really proud of that because I’m not sure I did that well the first time [Faris was married before to Ben Indra from 2004-2008]. But I do think we obviously cultivated something, and it was rewarding for a while. It was like ‘Oh, People seem to think we got all this shit all right.’”
Faris confirmed that "yes," she felt a weird pressure because of her and Pratt's couple fame, especially at the end of their relationship. "I don’t know if embarrassment [of letting fans down] is quite the right word. Something akin to that. I had a little bit of a childish feeling of ‘Oh come on, fucking grow up!’ Like, [there was] a little anger. But that’s not fair either, because I cultivated it though,” she explained.
“We intentionally cultivated this idea of like, ‘Look at this beautiful family.’ There were so many moments that were like that but of course just like anything on social media, you don’t post like, ‘Where the fuck is the toilet paper?!’ or whatever. I think it’s a very hard forum to be genuine, and I think it does a disservice to people to not be."
Faris is currently dating cinematographer Michael Barrett. Pratt and Faris announced their separation in August 2017. "Anna and I are sad to announce we are legally separating," Pratt wrote then. "We tried hard for a long time, and we’re really disappointed. Our son has two parents who love him very much and for his sake we want to keep this situation as private as possible moving forward. We still have love for each other, will always cherish our time together and continue to have the deepest respect for one another."
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she's not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.
