Demi Moore on losing herself in 3 marriages: 'I had changed' to 'fit what I thought somebody else wanted'
Demi Moore learned an important lesson in self-love from her failed marriages to Ashton Kutcher, Bruce Willis and Freddy Moore. During an appearance on SiriusXM’s the Jess Cagle Show, the 57-year-old actress opened up about how that helped her heal from her divorces.
“I think it’s a process of, you know, not to sound cliché, but it’s really a process of learning to love yourself,” Moore shared. “Accepting who you are just as you are. For me, I had changed myself so many times over and over to fit what I thought somebody else wanted. It’s that idea that we’re kind of conditioned to work towards being desired, but we’re not supposed to have desires of our own.”
The theme of being in a marriage and losing yourself is something Moore talked about in her best-selling memoir Inside Out. The Ghost star wed musician Freddy Moore in 1981, but filed for divorce three years later. In the book, she admitted to being unfaithful the night before their marriage.
“Why didn’t I go and see the man I was committing to spend the rest of my life with to express my doubts? Because I couldn’t face the fact that I was getting married to distract myself from grieving the death of my father,” she wrote. “Because I felt there was no room to question what I’d already put in motion. I couldn’t get out of the marriage, but I could sabotage it.”
Moore and Willis, who share three daughters, were married for 13 years before splitting in 2000. She wrote about being “very proud” of how they handled their breakup.
Moore wed Kutcher in 2005, but they separated six years later. In Inside Out, Moore confirmed long-rumored claims that they had threesomes while married, which she said she did to appease the That ‘70s Show star. Moore also gave up 20 years of sobriety to appeal to Kutcher, she wrote. But despite her high-profile divorces, it doesn’t sound like Moore is deterred from finding love again.
“Working through a relationship, it’s really commendable in our disposable times,” she added to Cagle. “You know, to go through the journey of really honoring the love that brought you together in the first place and to really give it everything you’ve got. But you can’t do that really without the love and acceptance of yourself.”
Learning to love herself is something that got Moore get sober, too. She talked about how the late director Joel Schumacher helped her get clean when they were making St. Elmo’s Fire. The actress called it a case of “somebody seeing more of you than you see of yourself.”
“I will forever be so grateful to him. In a way he was doing it for himself, he wasn’t yet sober. It was like he was doing for me what he couldn’t yet do for himself,” she said of Schumacher, who died in June of cancer. “Work was the only thing that meant anything to me. I didn’t have any value, I wasn’t enough to have kept myself sober, but doing the film was.”
Moore is currently lending her voice to the new erotic podcast Dirty Diana. The six-part series tells the story of a dying marriage and how two partners find their way back each other.
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