When I tell Dodd as much, she laughs, then says, "Yeah, because I'm actually happy!"
"I'm happier, my daughter's happier," she continues. "She tells all her friends she likes her parents not being married. Because now her friends' parents are splitting up, so she's giving advice to the other kids. 'Hey, listen, it's not so bad. It's actually better. It's quiet in the house. There's no tension.'"
It wasn't always this way. Kelly and Michael married in 2006 after two years of dating, and things were good…until they weren't. As the COO of LeapFrog, a major tech company, Michael traveled for work a lot. When he was home, Kelly says, he preferred to stay in but she liked going out. She felt they were growing apart. Plus, she didn't like San Francisco, where they lived. "The weather was horrible," she remembers. "I didn't want my daughter to grow up there. I did not want my daughter to have that childhood-in-the-city life."
She filed for divorce in 2012, and she says it took Michael by surprise. "He didn't want the divorce the first time," she says, "so it was a shock and made everything miserable for me." It didn't help that Kelly had moved on to a new relationship and gotten engaged while she was still technically married. "So bizarre, I know," she admits. "But the divorce took so long. It was all these layers of negative for years and years and years."
Things got better, eventually. Kelly ended her engagement, and she and Michael moved near each other in Orange County to focus on coparenting Jolie. They started cooking dinner together, which led to other hangouts. It was going so well they decided to stop the divorce proceedings and work on their marriage. Things were good the first year. But in year two the same old issues resurfaced.
Tired of fighting, the two reached a mutual decision in 2017: Let's get divorced.
The process was easier this time around. "[We] just put things in perspective," Dodd says. "What's really the most important thing here? Our daughter. Stop talking bad about me. I don't talk bad about you. We need to coparent, to be there for her, to be happy together, so she has a normal, productive life. We need to set our feelings aside for each other and just focus on her. That's the main priority that we both have in common." There's also no boyfriend in the way, which she says probably makes it easier on her husband. "When they show [on Real Housewives the] guys I'm going on dates with, he’ll text me, 'They're a dumbass' and 'What are you doing with that?'"
Dodd knows these come from a place of love. "He texted me yesterday and [my friends were] like, 'Oh my God, he still loves you.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, well, what's not to love?'" She pauses, then adds, "Just kidding."
That's not to say they don't ever fight anymore, but they work to put any anger aside (and, most important, keep it off social media). It calls to mind the wider trend of celebrities who claim divorce doesn't have to be acrimonious, a trash fire of anger, tears, and custody battles. If you can get into the right mind-set, they say, this can become a new adventure—a happy chapter, even. Goop's "conscious uncoupling" is the most famous example of this, but Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux's divorce statement also declared their decision was "lovingly made." Kelly's own costar Gina Kirschenheiter insists she and her husband are "best friends" despite ending their marriage.
