Twice-married Sean Penn has opened up about his romantic life, revealing that no woman has ever really loved him.
“There is no shame in saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don’t feel I’ve ever had that,” the Oscar winner says in the new issue of Esquire. “I have been the only one that was unaware of the fraud in a few of these circumstances blindly.”
Penn was married to “Forest Gump” actress Robin Wright. They married in 1996 and divorced in 2010 after numerous attempts at reconciliation. Penn was also married to Madonna from 1985 to 1989.
Though he doesn’t mention Wright by name, the 52-year-old actor shares how he came to terms with his turbulent marriage and divorce.
“When you get divorced, all the truths come out, you sit there and go, ‘What the [bleep] was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way?’ Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense,” he admits to the men’s magazine. “It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me.”
Less than one year later after their divorce, their younger son Hopper, 19, was involved in a serious skateboarding accident. Hopper underwent brain surgery after the accident.
“It had already been eight months of divorce and [bleep], and raising a kid that’s going through the divorce himself, and then this [bleep]ing thing happens…it was a tough, tough time,” Penn says.
The actor, the founder of J/P Haitian Relief Organization, says that his humanitarian work in the earthquake ravaged island nation helped him put his divorce and his son’s accident into perspective.
“The road started with the most obvious kind of trauma – my son’s head – and then to get to a place that had been just so devastated and traumatized, and then to see that in fact most of the trauma actually predated the earthquake,” he says. “You had a country that had never experienced anything that related to comfort, and out of that you had great trauma – but also this great strength that, I think, we all benefited from.”