Jennie Garth has been speaking openly about the emotional wreckage of her divorce from Peter Facinelli and what came after. The Beverly Hills, 90210 actress says she reached a point where she could see her own light dimming, and she's now sharing how she found her way back from it.
Garth and Facinelli married in 2001 and had three daughters together, Luca, Lola and Fiona, before splitting in 2013. She has said that during the collapse of that marriage she noticed she wasn't putting off good vibes anymore and could see the change in herself in the mirror. That admission, made in an interview in April 2026, captures how much grief and anger had worn her down at the time.
After the divorce, Garth started a new relationship with Dave Abrams. They married in 2015, separated briefly in 2018, then reconciled in 2019. Their relationship wasn't without its own hard patches. Garth has spoken about the couple's struggles with IVF, telling SELF that they kept trying to have a baby and it kept failing, a strain that affected both of them. Eventually Garth learned that Abrams planned to file for divorce, and she found out through a TMZ article rather than from him directly. Looking back on that moment, she said it all comes down to people-pleasing, a realization that has shaped how she sees her own patterns in relationships.
Despite everything, Garth has worked hard to keep her co-parenting relationship with Facinelli functional and even warm. In 2024, she invited him onto her podcast, "I Choose Me," to talk through their divorce and how they've handled raising their daughters together. She said they both wanted the conversation to be positive and helpful. Facinelli, who is now engaged to Lily Anne Harrison, has echoed that sentiment, saying he loves both Dave and Jennie and pointing to the value of the friendship they've built while co-parenting.
Garth describes the whole experience as a period of real personal growth for everyone involved, each person coming to their own understanding in their own time. It's a theme she's returned to for over a decade. Back in 2014, in an interview with Access Hollywood, she told people going through hard times to let themselves fall apart, because that falling apart is part of how healing actually happens.
What I'd tell a client about this
Here's the lesson I keep coming back to when I read stories like Jennie Garth's: healing isn't tidy, and it isn't fast. Garth didn't go from a broken marriage to a stable one in a straight line. She had another relationship end, she dealt with fertility struggles, and she found out about a major life change through a tabloid before hearing it from her own partner. And she still came out the other side able to sit across from her ex-husband and have a generous, useful conversation about raising their kids. That's not because she skipped the hard part. It's because she let herself go through it.
As a coach, I take stories like this and turn them into one useful takeaway for clients, and this one is simple: give yourself permission to fall apart before you try to rebuild. Trying to hold everything together while you're grieving a relationship, whether it's a marriage or something else, tends to backfire. The people who move through it best are usually the ones who stop performing "fine" and let the mess be visible for a while.
One thing to do this week
Pick one relationship in your life, past or present, that you've never fully let yourself feel your feelings about. This week, give yourself twenty uninterrupted minutes to sit with it. Write it out, talk it out loud, or just let yourself feel whatever comes up. Not to fix anything. Just to stop holding your breath.
Read our previous article: A Colorado Family's Grief Becomes a Film That's Already Saved Lives
