Paulina Porizkova says ‘abandonment issues’ and ‘permanent anxiety’ won’t stop her search for love

Paulina Porizkova suggested that she's open to finding love again. (Photo: Jim Spellman/WireImage)
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Paulina Porizkova is self-aware about the idea that she’s happier in a relationship, even with “abandonment issues” and “permanent anxiety.”

“So, what's wrong with being single?” the 55-year-old model wrote on Instagram Wednesday. “There are ducks and there are geese. Geese mate for life. One of the many important things I’ve learned recently, (besides my abandonment issues, daddy issues, narcissism issues, control issues, permanent anxiety and sometimes depression issues - as explained by my friends) is that I AM A GOOSE. Not a duck.”

Porizkova, whose estranged husband and former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek died at the age of 75 in September 2019, added, “I love to experience life with someone else. I hear you when you tell me that solitude is beautiful, that I have to love myself before I can love others, and all that stuff. And I’ll reply with, yes. That is your way. I admire and respect your fondness for your own company. You’re better off not having to rely on anyone else. Sometimes I envy you. But it is NOT me. I am a goose.”

The two were married for nearly three decades and separated in 2017, a surprise Porizkova revealed the next year in public. “The love we have for one another is so wide and deep, it’s practically intangible,” she wrote on Instagram.

However, following Ocasek’s death from hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (and her discovery of his body in their Manhattan home), a directive to cut her out of his will was an aftershock.

Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova, pictured at the "MTV20: Live and Almost Legal" party in 2001. (Photo: Evan Agostini/ImageDirect)
Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova, pictured at the "MTV20: Live and Almost Legal" party in 2001. (Photo: Evan Agostini/ImageDirect)

The knowledge “made the grieving process really, really tricky,” as Porizkova told CBS Sunday Morning in February. “I would love to be able to be sad and miss him. And not also feel this incredible hurt and betrayal.”

Since Ocasek’s death, the model has guarded her romantic life, though she told the New York Post in 2019 that she dipped in and out of the online dating pool. “I downloaded [the exclusive dating app] Raya after we split up,” she said. “I posted my picture for maybe four weeks and got no response. I didn’t have a single taker.” Although then, according to the Post, Porizkova was “happily seeing someone.”

As her personal life changed, so did her views on beauty. The Sports Illustrated model (who posed nude for the 2019 Swimsuit Issue at age 54) is leading the age acceptance movement with bare-faced Instagram portraits and a vulnerability toward normalizing mental health problems.

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