Demi Lovato Said Her Failed Engagement Gave Her an Unexpected “Sense of Relief”
The fact that this relationship didn't work was "a huge sign" for the singer.
Like so many of us, Demi Lovato has been on a path of self-discovery for several years. Though hers may have higher hills and lower valleys—and be intensely publicized—she’s still just trying to figure out who she is like the rest of us. And when she broke off her engagement to Max Ehrich last year, Lovato said she felt a sense of relief, and that was “a huge sign.”
“When I started getting older, I started realizing how queer I really am,” Lovato said in her March cover interview for Glamour. “This past year I was engaged to a man, and when it didn’t work, I was like, ‘This is a huge sign.’ I thought I was going to spend my life with someone. Now that I wasn’t going to, I felt this sense of relief that I could live my truth.”
Lovato said she feels too queer to be with a cis-gendered man, and said that after hooking up with a girl, she realized ‘I like this a lot more.’ It felt better. It felt right.
“Some of the guys I was hanging out with—when it would come time to be sexual or intimate, I would have this kind of visceral reaction,” she said. “Like, ‘I just don’t want to put my mouth there.’ It wasn’t even based on the person it was with. I just found myself really appreciating the friendships of those people more than the romance, and I didn’t want the romance from anybody of the opposite sex.”
Lovato noted that she wished she had trusted her intuition long before now, because if so, she probably wouldn’t have ended up in that relationship last year at all. “Because I denied my intuition of all the red flags that had popped up, I had no one else to blame but myself,” she said. But perhaps that relationship was a confirmation she needed to help her shape her identity.
“I’m the type of person that when you take something out of my life, something else just becomes more beautiful,” Lovato told Glamour early on in the interview. “I think that when the universe shuts one door, it opens another or there’s a window to open. It just depends on your perspective and how you choose to look at it.”
Painful as it was, going through the relationship and the breakup got Lovato to where she needs to be in the moment: happy, queer, and ready to start listening to her gut.
