Jennie Garth and Peter Facinelli are not holding anything back.
The actors, who had been married for 12 years, dissected the dissolution of their marriage during a brutally honest recording for Garth’s podcast, “I Choose Me,” released on Wednesday.
The two, who split in 2012, spoke about having their first kid in their early 20s and how that affected their relationship.
“I was in this marriage, and it felt to me a little bit like an arranged marriage,” Facinelli said after explaining that he had a kid with Garth just six months after he moved to Los Angeles.
While Garth was established in the business and had a hit role on “Beverly Hills 90210,” Facinelli said he was “a baby having a baby” who didn’t know who he was yet ― and he hadn’t even started his career.
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“I loved you, and we had this beautiful family, you know, from the outside,” Facinelli explained. But he said he “didn’t know who I was, and so I needed to figure that out. I didn’t feel like I had the space to do that within the marriage.”
“I felt like time was going by, and I didn’t want to wake up and be like 60 years old and be like, ’Well, did I live this life for all these other people and not know who I was?” the “Twilight” actor said, adding that the two’s kids played a big decision in him staying with Garth for as long as he did.
“I think that if we didn’t have kids, I wouldn’t have stayed ’cause I would have had the freedom to go, ‘OK, I need to be able to figure out who I am,’” he said.
Despite Facinelli making the decision to separate, he said he still found it difficult.
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“It broke my heart to break up a family, and it was one of those decisions where it’s like, you never know if you’re making the right decision,” he said.
Though the former couple have been through the hardships of divorce and co-parenting, Facinelli said he felt “really blessed” that the two have “wonderful kids” and that they’re “through the other side of it.”
Garth has since remarried, and tied the knot with actor Dave Abrams in 2015. She was also previously married to musician Daniel B. Clark from 1994 to 1996.
Facinelli is currently engaged to actor Lily Anne Harrison, who he shares a nearly 2-year-old son, Jack, with. He was previously engaged to “Thor” actor Jaimie Alexander, until the two split in 2016.
