I have great hope for love 'Do I need men?” actress Reese Witherspoon asks. “I don’t think it’s about needing men. It’s about love.”
Sitting in a quiet corner of a Beverly Hills hotel lounge overlooking a garden, Reese wears a chic black dress, black open-toe pumps, and gold dangle earrings. An Oscar-winner for 2005’s Walk the Line, Reese, 32, is reportedly the world’s highest-paid actress. She is also astonishingly beautiful. Her new movie, Four Christmases, a comedy about family ties co-starring Vince Vaughn, opens this month.
“Everybody needs love,” she tells me. “Everyone deserves it.”
The great love of Reese’s life was once actor Ryan Phillippe, 34. They met at her 21st birthday party in 1997 and married two years later. She admits that in some respects she was naïve to believe that her marriage would last forever. “I wasn’t good about protecting myself,” she explains. “I spent a lot of my 20s just trying to make other people happy, rather than trying to figure out if doing that made me happy.”
Three months after they wed, their daughter Ava, now 8, was born. A son, Deacon, arrived in 2003. Then, a year ago, she and Ryan divorced.
“There are things in my life that are hard to reconcile, like divorce,” she says. “Sometimes it is very difficult to make sense of how it could possibly happen. Laying blame is so easy. I don’t have time for hate or negativity in my life. There’s no room for it. When you make wrong choices, you have to take responsibility for them: ‘What part of this do I own?’”
She pauses and takes a sip of tea. “I struggle to figure out what made me make those choices,” she admits. “All I can hope for is that I’ve learned something from it and won’t make the same choices again.”
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