Sara Shahi can currently be seen in the second season of seductive Netflix hit “Sex/Life”, and during an appearance on the “Not Skinny but Not Fat” podcast she opened up about how reading the script for the pilot episode gave her the “courage” to end her marriage to “Shameless” star Steve Howey.
“I was just questioning everything. As a wife and as a mom, you get told, ‘Well, but you have it good. You have it good,’” she said, as reported by People. “I just felt so unseen. … [‘Sex/Life’] gave me the courage to say, ‘I’m not happy. And I feel like we should as individuals have the right to be happy.’”
According to Shahi, the arrival of their children — William, 13, and twins Violet and Knox, 8 — led to some unforeseen changes in their marriage.
“From the time that our first child was born, our relationship suffered and it was hard to get back on track,” she said.
“We were together for a very long time. We were together for 18 years. That’s not a failure. That was a long time. But the last 10 years we really did struggle,” Shahi continued.
“Any flaws you have in the relationship before you have kids, if you don’t settle those things — that was my experience of, ‘It gets worse,’” she added. “It only gets worse. You have less time for each other, you have less patience, you have less desire because you’re just so damn tired.”
It was while filming “Sex/Life” that she began dating co-star Adam Demos, and she clarified that the timing of that relationship didn’t begin until several months after she and Howey divorced.
“It was not instant,” she said of her connection with Demos. “It was over time, it was getting to know him as a person and seeing how aligned our values were.”
What started as a friendship, she explained, organically grew into something deeper.
“I also really respected how he talked about his mom and how he talked about women,” she said. “There was just so much that I started seeing over time that made me go, ‘Oh, you’re kind of everything I’ve ever wanted.’ And that’s when we started being together.”