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" There was no better way for Gwyneth Paltrow to announce her separation from Chris Martin, her husband of 10 years, than to do so on GOOP, in a post titled &amp;quot;Conscious Uncoupling.&amp;quot; Call it pretentious, call it calculated (all celebrity statements are, anyway) \u2014 it doesn&amp;#039;t matter. As long as the public reaction was mostly &amp;quot;How very Gwyneth of her,&amp;quot; Gwyneth got it right. She stayed so on-brand when delivering the news of her separation that the news itself \u2014 a not-so-on-brand revelation \u2014 became an afterthought. As she and Martin say in the statement, their union has always been a private one. Save for the occasional Coldplay concert or double date with Jay Z and Beyonc\u00E9, they were a low-key couple, keeping their public appearances to a minimum, favoring the quiet streets of London to the chaotic red carpets of L.A. Independent of their marriage, though, Gwyneth was and is an outspoken celebrity. You don&amp;#039;t launch GOOP and release two cookbooks if you don&amp;#039;t want people to know you have strong opinions on the right way to live. Gwyneth has built a brand around mindful eating, rigorous workouts, juice cleanses, and Zen-like behavior \u2014 and she wants you to know that. But like any cautious (and, in this case, smart) public figure, she wants you to know what she stands for without having to give you any real insight into her private life. Gwyneth doesn&amp;#039;t do a ton of formal press, but when she does, you get the sense that she knows exactly what personal note she wants to drop: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so lucky that I spent time with Brad [Pitt], somebody who was such a good person, especially when I was, like, such a mess,&amp;quot; she told Diane Sawyer in 2010. &amp;quot;Ben [Affleck] makes life tough for himself,&amp;quot; she said in that same sit-down. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s got a lot of complication, and you know, he really is a great guy. So I hope he sorts himself out.&amp;quot; On the subject of Martin, she&amp;#039;s delivered a variation on the generic yet titillating &amp;quot;marriage is work&amp;quot; line over the years. It&amp;#039;s sated the public&amp;#039;s appetite, but what is she really saying in any of these cases? Nothing! You get the sense that she&amp;#039;s sharing a piece of herself without actually having to share a piece of herself; that&amp;#039;s a mission accomplished. (The fact that she gets to take a few harmless swipes at her exes is just a bonus.) She can be even sassier when it comes to her ex-girlfriends. She once wrote on GOOP, &amp;quot;Back in the day, I had a &amp;#039;frenemy&amp;#039; who, as it turned out, was pretty hell-bent on taking me down \u2026 One day I heard that something unfortunate and humiliating had happened to this person. And my reaction was deep relief and...happiness.&amp;quot; The presumed target was her ex-BFF Winona Ryder, but naming names was beside the point. She&amp;#039;d said just enough to set up her ultimate Gwyneth message, which was that she was ashamed of her behavior. &amp;quot;Why does it feel so good to hear something bad about someone you don&amp;#039;t like? Or someone you DO like?&amp;quot; she wrote. By questioning her motives, she allowed herself to come off as a work-in-progress, a seeker of enlightenment. Here is a woman who aspires to a life as free of Schadenfreude as it is of processed foods and toxins. How very Gwyneth.   And what&amp;#039;s so wrong with that, really? Be healthy. Be fit. Don&amp;#039;t hate. What \u2026 a monster? Were it not for GOOP&amp;#039;s outrageously priced everything, perhaps Gwyneth would be praised for her Oprah-esque life goals rather than mocked for them. But she couldn&amp;#039;t resist those million-dollar snow boots, and so she&amp;#039;s been pegged as holier-than-thou, elitist, a snob.  What happens to that woman when she gets divorced? She gets torn apart. Not so perfect now, are you, Gwyneth? It&amp;#039;s a gross and insensitive reaction (breaking up is hard to do, people) \u2014 and Gwyneth, who&amp;#039;s been living with backlash for years, could surely see it coming. So Gwyneth did what she&amp;#039;s gotten pretty great at doing \u2014 she took control of the narrative. We&amp;#039;re not separating, we&amp;#039;re consciously uncoupling. I&amp;#039;m not releasing a statement to People, I&amp;#039;m driving traffic to my own site. (GOOP actually crashed after the announcement went out.) She steered herself right into the storm in such a way that the news became less about a failed marriage (which is nothing to be ashamed of, by the way), and more about the usual &amp;quot;Gwyneth being Gwyneth.&amp;quot; People were more obsessed with talking about the way she presented the information than they were, at least initially, in speculating about the specific causes of the breakup. They took the glimpse of what was going on that Gwyneth was willing to give them, and they ran with it, gleefully. In that sense, she got her divorce announcement exactly right. Make all the kale jokes you want, Twitter; Gwyneth just wanted you to leave her personal life out if it.  RELATED:  13 Photos Of Gwyneth Paltrow And Chris Martin As A Couple Twitter Reactions to the Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin Split Follow Patti on Twitter.  Photo credit: Getty Images  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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