Reese Witherspoon may be happily involved with Jake Gyllenhaal. But though the handsome, blue-eyed actor has been spotted with the blonde star and her children in locales from LA to London, she isn’t currently thinking about making their union permanent.
“Family is all we have in life, but I don’t know how I feel about marriage,” Reese told Parade magazine’s November 23 issue about the idea of once again walking down the aisle, just a year after her divorce from Ryan Phillippe. “Obviously, I’m not far enough out of being married to think about doing it again. You sort of reconstitute your family. You find a family, with people who come into your life for a reason.
“I definitely still have a capacity to love,” Reese continued. “Someone said to me once, ‘No matter what breakup you went through or what new love you find — the love you remember, like the love you now value, is yours. Whatever love you once gave to somebody else, it doesn’t go away. Even if it is only remembered love, it belongs to you.’
Though she isn’t ready to make it official, she hinted her romantic life with Jake continues to be inspiring.
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“Things change,” Reese added. “But your ability to love remains intact. Oh, I have a lot of hope for love! I do!””
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But Reese, who is gearing up for the release of her new film, “Four Christmases,” alongside Vince Vaughn, also told the magazine that sometimes she looks back. In the interview, Reese said she still deals with her divorce to Phillippe.
“There are things in my life that are hard to reconcile, like divorce,” she said. “Sometimes it is very difficult to make sense of how it could possibly happen. Laying blame is so easy. I don’t have time for hate or negativity in my life. There’s no room for it. When you make wrong choices, you have to take responsibility for them: ‘What part of this do I own?’”
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And like many people who have divorced, Reese too, revisits decisions she made in her marriage.
“I struggle to figure out what made me make those choices,” she said. “All I can hope for is that I’ve learned something from it and won’t make the same choices again.”
One conclusion the actress said she came to, is that she didn’t put herself first as a young person.
“I wasn’t good about protecting myself,” she said. “I spent a lot of my 20s just trying to make other people happy, rather than trying to figure out if doing that made me happy.”
Though there are some things she regrets from her 20s, Reese is proud of many of the decisions she made – like choosing to avoid scantily clad moments on screen.
“It takes perseverance and determination for any young woman to navigate the movie business,” she said. “It’s deeply offensive when they are objectified, treated like sex toys. It’s so easy to get attention early on in your career when you promote only the sexual side of yourself. It gains you popularity, but it doesn’t mean anything. Five years later, no one knows your name, and you wonder why.
“Trust me, I’ve had my moments,” she continued. “I’m like a junkyard dog. I’d say, ‘Why are they asking me to wear a bikini?’ I get tough, because I see the slippery slope… There are a lot of women who don’t respect themselves and hurt themselves. I grew up knowing strong women who value who you are and what you contribute to life.”
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