The holidays: They’re rich with drama. The wine spills, the lips loosen, and your woo-woo aunt goes on a diatribe against seed oils. Your dad won’t stop bringing up “woke culture,” so you stealthily conspire to cancel his Atlantic subscription while also checking how many hundreds of dollars it’d cost to take the next flight out. I’m imagining how Thanksgiving dinner will play out at former U.S. Women’s national soccer-team goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris’s house this year — and several years down the line, after her kids, Ocean and Sloane (now 2 and 3), find out that their mom aired out the dirty laundry about her divorce from their other mom on a podcast.
On Monday’s episode of the Naked Sports podcast, Harris revealed that she’d once proposed an open marriage with then-wife Ali Krieger as a last-ditch attempt to save their relationship. The pair met while playing on the NY Gotham soccer team and were married for four years; they officially split last fall, the details of which attracted public speculation after Harris started dating actress Sophia Bush. Harris states that she and Krieger struggled to find common ground beyond soccer and that she suffered from shame because of their lack of intimacy. “I didn’t know how to tell people that, like, oh, my wife doesn’t want to touch me,” she told podcast host Cari Champion. But she endured, becoming “very, very good at disassociating”: “That’s what my therapist knew right away — it was my ability to sit and suffer … my ability to serve other people before my own wants and needs,” she noted. Sure, I guess. But if I were in the therapist’s chair, I’d tell my client that some relationship details are best kept in session.