Miley Cyrus Explains Why She Initially Struggled Letting Go of Liam Hemsworth and Their Relationship

Alyssa Bailey
·4 min read

From ELLE

Miley Cyrus spoke for two hours on Joe Rogan's Joe Rogan Experience podcast, and in the wide-ranging discussion, Cyrus touched a bit on her divorce from Liam Hemsworth. She never referred to him by name, but she did talk about how hard it was dealing with the public perception of her, how she initially struggled letting go of the relationship because she was hooked on the comfort it gave her, and what she's looking for now as a newly-single woman.

The hardest thing about their split was it being public, Cyrus said: "I recently just went through a very public divorce that fucking sucked," she started. "What really sucked about it wasn't the fact that me and someone that I loved realized that we don't love each other the way that we used to anymore. That’s okay. I can accept that. I can't accept the villainizing and all those stories that like—it's just amazing to me that the public kind of thinks that there's no gap of time that they didn't see that could possibly be what led to this. Like it’s not 'one day you were happy on the carpet and the next day you were making out with your friend [Kaitlynn Carter] in Italy! What the fuck?' Well, there was a lot of time between that that you didn't see—it didn’t go. I didn't, you know. No, [you can’t rely on someone else’s narrative]."

Cyrus added toward the end of the discussion that love can give the same kind of high as drugs. The withdrawal from her breakup with Hemsworth felt like she was losing her pacifier and source of comfort initially, she said.

"Actually I called the love of mine who I was with when we got divorced, it was almost like a pacifier," she said. "It was that thing I just needed not because we were in love anymore but because the comfort and because my brain said, 'oh, this feels better. This is comforting.' But actually, knowing that I was giving in to an addiction made me feel way worse. I had the hangover. Next day, okay, we sleep together, next day, I’m totally hungover. It felt like a relapse every time I’d go back."

Photo credit: Michael Kovac - Getty Images
Photo credit: Michael Kovac - Getty Images

Cyrus added that she tends to just let go of relationships when they're over now. "I think men in my life have told me that I’m cold or I’m a cold fucking bitch because I leave when things are done," she said. "I was actually going to say, I’m freaky into a lot of freaky things, but I don’t fuck dead guys, when it’s over, it’s over and you’re dead to me and we move on. So that’s how I feel about it."

She added that: "When it’s over, it’s over. What’s painful isn’t the relationship, it’s then when it’s done, you holding on for that extra however long you try to make it work, something that’s not working, that’s what I did in the video [for "Midnight Sky"], and that’s what I hated when I was a kid, you know, from directors not knowing what they want and then getting frustrated with the child for not performing properly. It’s like, 'But you’re not communicating, and I’m a child, and you’re an adult'…and that was always really frustrating to me."

"And I think [because of that] now a non-negotiable in my relationship or dating, you better know what you want because I’m just not interested in taking another 10 years like did with my first love figuring that out."

Cyrus said this is the first time in her life since 2015 that she has really been single, calling it a "pivotal moment."

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