Emily Ratajkowski talks to Vogue Australia about divorce and single motherhood
One year after splitting from her husband Sebastian Bear-McClard, model Emily Ratajkowski says she is choosing to celebrate her divorce.
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Model and actor Emily Ratajkowski has spent a decade being vocal about objectification, sexism and feminism — and now she has turned her sights on divorce.
One year after divorcing from her husband Sebastian Bear-McClard in 2022, after four years of marriage, Ratajkowski says it’s chic to be divorced.
“What is the danger of glamorising divorce,” Ratajkowski asks in a Vogue Australia interview out on December 4.
“Who suffers in unhappy marriages? Children. And I can say that my son has never witnessed me get angry or be in a fight with anybody that I love.
“I would love to choose a person or have a partner who I don’t fight with at all. But that’s not always the case, and you don’t always find that out until after you’ve brought somebody else into the world.” Ratajkowski and Bear-McClard share a son.
The Gone Girl actor says she would rather celebrate her divorce than look at it as a failure. “I don’t know if it’s a bad thing, particularly when you think about the weight of the taboo of divorce, to say, ‘No, it’s not bad — actually, maybe it’s cool.’
“Even just sharing parts of my experience with my divorce has been somewhat cathartic and also kind of nice, because I don’t want everybody to think that I’m some perfect person.”
Ratajkowski, who is mother to two-year-old Sylvester Apollo, revealed she didn’t expect to have children until later on in life.
“I wasn’t somebody who always knew I was going to be a mother,” she says.
“It wasn’t something that was super on the agenda. I actually always imagined myself being much older when I became a parent.
“I think the beautiful thing was that I kind of didn’t have preconceptions. I really was interested in meeting my child and getting to know who they were before I decided to have positions, and develop that relationship in a respectful way without any kind of assumptions about how the two of us were going to interact.
“And that’s been, again, kind of handing over control and saying, ‘OK, what’s this going to be like?’.”
“I have moments where I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I’m 32 and I’m a single-income household with a child who I’m fully responsible for.’
“All of my decisions now, his future hinges on them and it’s this incredible responsibility and weight. But it’s such a gift also.
“And being able to be in a place where I am continuing to not just have a livelihood, but also evolve as a person … I guess there’s also power in that.”
The Vogue Australia December 2023 issue is on sale Monday, December 4; www.vogue.com.au
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