Jennie Garth and ex-husband Peter Facinelli have come a long way in their post-divorce relationship.
“This week on the ‘I Choose Me’ pod, I’m joined by Peter Facinelli, my ex-husband & father of my children,” Garth, 52, wrote via Instagram on Thursday, June 6, sharing a carousel of throwback photos with Facinelli, 50. “This was pretty big, for both of us.”
She continued, “We sat down together to discuss our divorce, communicating as ex-partners & for the first time EVER, we reflected on our coparenting journey. Turns out, we’ve come pretty far. To any of you going through this journey, whether at the start of it or at the point of where it just feels never-ending. I commend you! It’s not easy.”
Garth and Facinelli, who share three daughters, were married from 2001 to 2012. They broke down their dynamic for the Wednesday, June 5, episode of Garth’s iHeartRadio podcast.
“I felt a lot of it was I was in this marriage and it felt to me a little bit like an arranged marriage,” Facinelli told Garth in the episode. “Like, I loved you, and we had this beautiful family, from the outside but I just was I hadn’t developed who I was. I don’t even know how you could love me because I didn’t know me.”
He continued at the time, “Sometimes we would drive up to your mom’s house, and I was the guy who drove, I planned the vacations, I was the dad. I was the soccer coach and then I go play parts [on acting jobs] and I was this other person playing parts, and so I was just like, ‘Well, I never got [to] fully develop me.’ I didn’t know who I was, and so I needed to figure that out. I didn’t feel like I had the space to do that within the marriage.”
Once Garth and Facinelli divorced, they decided to split custody of daughters Luca, now 26, Lola, now 21, and Fiona, now 17.
“It was all about trying to find a balance and picking up the kids and knowing that they were going to miss you for the week and then dropping off knowing they were going to miss me for a week,” Facinelli explained. “I always felt like they were visiting me and maybe choosing a home, like your house is the home house and there’s a lot of feelings of like, ‘Well, is my house the house they come visit? Is your house the house they visit?’ You know, like, where is their home?”
Before Facinelli joined Garth on her podcast, the actress wasn’t sure it could ever happen.
“I never thought we would get to a place where we could have a civil conversation about our feelings,” Garth exclusively told Us Weekly in May, noting that they are “really good” now. “I mean, he’s very happy; he has a new baby. The girls are so happy with their new little brother. So, it’s a new vibe within the family of just acceptance and gratitude for what we created together.”
Garth remarried Dave Abrams in 2015, while Facinelli got engaged to Lily Anne Harrison in 2020. They welcomed their first baby together, son Jack, in 2022.
“[We] both have such respect for [our blended family] and such pride in our girls. That’s really what keeps us all united,” Garth gushed to Us.
