Actor Ben Stiller has described how separating from his wife Christine Taylor ultimately ended up strengthening their relationship.
“There’s nothing like that, when you come back,” he told The New York Times on January 11. “You have so much more appreciation for what you have, because we know we could not have it.”
“When we separated, it was just having space to see what our relationship was, what my life felt like when we weren’t in that relationship, how much I loved our family unit,” Stiller said to The Times, adding that the couple lived separately for years before ultimately getting back together.
Ben Stiller Says He & His Wife Were Separated for 3-4 Years
GettyBen Stiller with wife Christine Taylor.Stiller explained that the separation spanned years.
“It was like three or four years that we weren’t together but we always were connected,” he told The Times.
The couple separated in 2017 after marrying in 2000, according to E! News.
According to E! News, Stiller and Taylor share kids Ella 22, and Quinlin, 19.
“In my mind, I never didn’t want us to be together,” Stiller told The Times. “I don’t know where Christine was, you’d have to ask her, but COVID put us all together in the same house.”
Ben Stiller & Christine Taylor Began Living Together Again During COVID
They started living together again in 2020, Stiller said in the interview.
“It was almost a year of living in the same house before we were actually together,” Stiller told The Times. “But I’m so grateful for it, and I think not that many people do come back together when they separate.”
For her part, Taylor told the “Drew Barrymore Show” that she and Stiller “both started to grow in different directions. And when we made the decision to separate, it was not something we wanted to talk publicly about or took lightly.”
She added on that show: “We got married very quickly after meeting each other. We knew each other six months, got engaged, married within the year, and had Ella that next year.”
Taylor added of the years the couple was separated, “During that time apart, we got to know who we are.”
“I think we have these growth spurts even as adults,” Taylor told Barrymore. “I feel like we needed some time to figure that out.” She told Barrymore that the pair felt like “it was sort of like we were both at this impasse of ‘let’s figure out what’s best: What’s best for each other at this chapter in our lives?'”
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