Allison Janney On Not Getting Married And Having Kids

Publish date: 2024-05-06

Allison Janney has opened up about finding joy in being a happily single woman.

In the virtual sit down on The Drew Barrymore Show on Tuesday, the actor discussed her life and explained that she has been content focusing on herself and her career.

During the interview, Barrymore asked the Oscar winner: 'You have put out there in the world that you are not looking to get married or have children — is this the truth?'

The 61-year-old actor confidently replied: 'Yeah... I think if I would have found the right guy at the right time who wanted to have kids, I probably would have with the right partner, ’cause I wasn’t ever really confident that I wanted to have kids.'

The I Tonya actor, who was previously engaged to actor Richard Jenik, then said with a laugh: 'I would rather regret not having kids than have kids and regret that.'

She added: 'I really am [at] this time in my life getting to know who I am and what I want. I’d love to find ― eventually find ― someone to share my life with, but if it doesn’t happen, I’ll be just fine. But it would be nice.'

allison janney

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The former West Wing star is one of many celebrities who has discussed not having children and refusing to make choices about their martial status based on societal precedent.

In an interview with ELLE US in July 2019, Miley Cyrus revealed that the current state of climate change has affected her stance on having children. 'We've been doing the same thing to the earth that we do to women,' she said in the interview.

'We just take and take and expect it to keep producing. And it's exhausted. It can't produce. We're getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child. Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I'm not bringing in another person to deal with that.'

Actor and presenter Tracee Ellis Ross has also spoken publicly about her decision to not have children.

In an interview for The Times in 2018, Ross said: 'I'm constantly asking myself questions, reminding myself, 'Are you making that decision for you or someone else?' The husband and the babies are the expectation of what's supposed to happen at a certain point, and people fall back on, "Well, that's the point of the human species, procreation." And I'm, like, "I think there are a lot of babies, isn't that part of what's going wrong, there's too many?"

'Some people could be working on the world being a better place, or just being happy.'

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