It’s been nearly exactly a year since we last took a peek into the marriage and divorce of Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger and both seem to have moved on to new adventures and new partners. But never fear, more information is here, as Ashlyn Harris recently appeared on the Naked Sports podcast and really dug back into the breakup and her feelings around it.
At the podcast’s opening, Harris explained that she’s spent a lot of time in therapy and gotten to a place she was not in last year. This place is “an age where you stop giving a fuck what people think of you.” She added that she feels that a lot of the backlash she received last year was “projected trauma… the projection that people have based on their own scars, It’s not my burden to carry. I’m good with the decisions I’ve made. Do I always get it right? No. But I continue to wake up every day and choose to be excellent.”
Ali + Ashlyn in 2020 (Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TAG Heuer )
Harris says that in her marriage, she felt that she had become “very, very good at disassociating.” As a “team player” she says that she hadn’t learned to put herself first, oversharing: “And that’s what my therapist knew right away — it was my ability to sit and suffer…my ability to serve other people before my own wants and needs, which I genuinely think probably kept me in that marriage for as long as it did.”
She says that they’d not been intimate for a long time prior to the divorce which was hard for her as a “touchy feely person.” The two had already separated and had been living separately for months by the time Ashlyn filed for divorce.
She also shares that the vitriolic and intense reaction to the breakup from fans and all the online bullying that ensued was the hardest thing she’d ever been through, even driving her to have suicidal thoughts.
Ashlyn says they considered an open marriage a year before calling it quits, but it felt out of step for both of them. They feared the impact of the public eye and public response to their highly public and highly commodified relationship. She added:
“I would never want to torch her reputation… and no matter how painful this process has been… I know I stand in my integrity and it will not make me feel better by hurting her. I want her to be happy, I want nothing but the best for her. I care about her genuinely. There is a reason we chose to have children together, there’s a reason we were together for a decade. Some relationships just don’t work and that’s okay.”
After Ali’s Self magazine story came out, Ashlyn says that she felt hurt and misrepresented — she told her therapist about it and her therapist explained:
“This is [Ali’s] experience, and you can’t change that. She’s allowed to grieve this way, if this is her truth, this is her truth. But if she would’ve saw you and your side, you wouldn’t be in the position that you are. stop expecting to be seen and heard, that’s the reason why you’re not together anymore…. that’s when I was like, we’re going to have two versions of this that are going to be very different. And she’s never gonna be okay with my version and I’m never gonna be okay with hers. But we never spoke the same language, which is how we got here.”
You can listen to the full podcast episode here.
If there’s anything I loathe, it’s weaponized therapy-speak.