“I’ve experienced perspectives [and] I’ve had conversations with people I’ve known, loved and trusted and still do, who thought, ‘Your career would go better if you didn’t go outside holding your girlfriend’s hand.’
“And I was like, ‘So you want me to live a partial life? And you want me to uphold, perpetuate and sustain a system that excludes people?’ And I just can’t do that.”
Kristen admitted one of the reasons she wanted to be open about her sexuality is because she is keen to play a part in the world being a “more open and accepting place”.
She added: “I didn’t want to be part of a comic book. But what I didn’t want to do was hide from the world we live in.
“I want to define it, I want to make it a more open and accepting place.
“And so I thought it was necessary for me to – I was already holding my girlfriend’s hand in public.
“None of my relationships have felt guarded because I didn’t want people to know me. I want people to know me.
“I felt like they did, so I didn’t really need to fill in the blanks. But at that point it felt like a statement that just might unlock other people’s doors.”
In December, Kristen told how being married to Dylan reshaped her sense of home and identity.
She told Esquire: “It’s so nice to have a family. It’s so nice to not be an unmoored individual.
“Dylan came into my life, and I immediately was like, ‘It’s so important to handpick and curate the people that surround you.’”