## Marriage, Motherhood, and What It Meant to Make a Family
Drew Barrymore’s relationships and marriages have been subjects of public interest throughout her adult life, partly because she has been willing to discuss them openly and partly because they are legible as part of a larger story about a person working out what love and family mean when your own family of origin was, in significant ways, a source of harm rather than protection.
Her first marriage, to bar owner Jeremy Thomas in 1994, lasted less than three months. She was nineteen. She has described it in various ways since — as an impulsive decision, as an experience that taught her something about what she was and wasn’t looking for. Its brevity was the most notable thing about it.
Her marriage to comedian and filmmaker Tom Green, with whom she eloped in March 2001, lasted approximately six months. Green has spoken publicly about the relationship and its ending with characteristic candor, and Drew has done the same. It was a relationship between two people who cared for each other and were not, ultimately, suited for the particular demands of a sustained domestic partnership.
Will Kopelman, whom she married in June 2012, was the father of her two daughters: Olive Barrymore Kopelman, born in September 2012, and Frankie Barrymore Kopelman, born in April 2014. The marriage ended in 2016, and Drew and Will Kopelman have described their post-divorce relationship as a successful co-parenting arrangement, one built on mutual commitment to the wellbeing of their daughters even in the absence of a marital relationship. In 2023, Drew moved to Manhattan, describing the decision partly in terms of wanting to be closer to Kopelman so that the children could more easily spend time with both parents.