Malin Akerman's marriage broke down after parenthood 'changed' relationship
Malin Akerman has admitted becoming parents led to her split from Roberto Zincone because they stopped communicating.
Malin Akerman has admitted becoming parents had a negative impact on her marriage to Roberto Zincone.
The 48-year-old actress married the musician in 2007 and their son Sebastian was born in 2013, but they split just months after welcoming their child into the world because the "dynamics" of their relationship had changed so much.
Speaking on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Malin said: "It wasn’t how we planned it. A child changes you. It changes the dynamics in your relationships. It takes a really strong relationship to keep that together, and we just didn’t have that.”
The Hunting Wives star and Roberto realised soon after Sebastian was born that they "were not communicating".
She added: “We hadn’t talked about parenting. We hadn’t talked about what our schedules might look like. We were so naive stepping into this.
"[We realised] 'tThis doesn’t work with us as parents together'.”
At the time, the Comeback star - who went on to marry Jack Donnelly in 2018 - admitted "it was a lot" because she was navigating first-time parenthood while going through a divorce.
She said: “Was it hard? Yeah. To be going through a divorce, I just started back at work. I was now bringing my son with me to work.
“Luckily, I was producing on the show that I was starring in, so my office space turned into a nursery.
“It’s like, the beauty is I got to have him with me every day. It was lovely.
“But it was really hard to be mourning the end of a relationship, doing a comedy, stepping into motherhood, being up all night feeding him, you know, and then going to work."
Two months after she and Roberto separated, Malin's best friend moved in with her for around a year and during that time, she started having "dance parties" which helped her reclaim herself.
She said: “It was the best experience we’ve ever had...
“Every Sunday I have a neon sign and it says Sebi Sunday.
“And it became Sebi Sundays because every Sunday I’d invite all the parents, all my friends and non-parents come over, hang by the pool, pop the rosé, kids are roaming around, this is great.”
And after the children went to sleep, the music turned up and the adults danced all night.
She added: “[We would] dance our troubles away. It was the best, most cathartic [experience].
“It was like celebrating the good things in life. Seeing the community that I had versus seeing the losses. It was a lot.”
Around two years later, the 27 Dresses actress underwent a "year of reckoning", where she began therapy and transcendental meditation.
She said: “I started doing some deep, deep therapy on figuring out who I was, what my intimacy issues were, why I was keeping people at arm’s length, how to kind of navigate that.
“And just shifting and seeing who I am now in my 30s as a mother, a single mother in the world and what does that mean to me. So it took some time to figure that out.”
