Miley Cyrus reflects on split with Liam Hemsworth 1 year later: ‘It’s like a death when you lose a love that deep’
Miley Cyrus is reflecting on her split with Liam Hemsworth one year later.
Although the “Midnight Sky” singer is going through another breakup now — with Cody Simpson — she looked back on parting ways with her The Last Song co-star last summer and equated it to suffering a death.
“I had a very public, very big breakup that was over a 10-year span of a relationship,” Cyrus, 27, said during a very revealing interview on Barstool Sports’s Call Her Daddy podcast to promote her new single. “It’s like a death when you lose a love that deep. It feels like a death. Honestly, sometimes [death] even feels easier because [with a breakup] the person is still walking on the Earth.”
But it doesn’t mean she’s pining for Hemsworth, who is now dating model Gabriella Brooks. Cyrus talked a lot about how in future relationships — with either men or women, because she’s pansexual — she requires that her partner bring something to the table.
“I allowed so many people to just come and add their toxic breath to my air and suck the life out of my spaces,” Cyrus said, noting that has been the case in non-romantic relationships too. “i’m just over it.”
Cyrus also said the house fire that she and Hemsworth went through, in November 2018 amid the California wildfires, began “one of the most transformative periods of my life.” She and the Australian actor — who started dating in 2008 after meeting on the set of The Last Song and were on and and off in their relationship after — married the following month, only to split last summer. “Going though a massive breakup, one thing I gained through all the loss is an idea that what I do is for me.” And she added that putting yourself first doesn’t “mean you’re selfish.”
Hemsworth came up earlier in the interview when Cyrus detailed her sexual journey.
“I was attracted to girls way before I was attracted to guys,” said Cyrus, who came out as pansexual in 2015. “When I was 11 years old, I used to think that like Minnie Mouse was super f**king hot. Which is so good I ended up on Disney [Channel’s Hannah Montana]. My chances with Minnie went up by like 100. She was super hot to me. I always thought the female characters in movies were way hotter than any of the guys. I never understood what these girls were doing with these idiots.”
Cyrus recalled being 11 and hearing from female friends about their experimenting with guys.
“And I didn’t really understand it, so I got my girlfriends to kinda hook up with me,” she said. “The first [person] I ever hooked up with was a girl. Two of them.”
Asked if it was more than kissing, she replied, “Yeah.”
Cyrus said, “I didn’t go all the way with a dude [until] I was 16,” quipping that no, “it wasn’t Nick Jonas” — “I ended up marrying the guy. So that’s pretty crazy.”
Cyrus also admitted to lying to Hemsworth about her sexual experience with guys, lying and telling him she slept with another guy prior.
“I lied and said he wasn’t the first so I didn’t feel like a loser,” she recalled. “I made somebody up that i knew, but we never actually had sex before.”
Though that like came back to haunt her. Years later, Hemsworth’s friend married the guy Cyrus claimed to have slept with, calling it “a full circle story” and “so f**king weird.”
“i was 24 [and i had to say, I lied when i was 16,” Cyrus said. “It was a lie that i held onto for like 10 years.”
Asked what kind of partner Cyrus is looking for now, she said boring is actually better to counterbalance her life and personality.
“I usually end up complaining they are boring, but that is what i need,” she said of mate. “I need boring. I need an anchor. I need a weight.”
That said, she also needs someone “to bring more to the table than their plate. They can’t just be like ‘fill me up’ all the f**king time. That’s a big part of my life — filling people back up and that can make me go below [empty] — so it’s important that i feel fulfilled. They have to bring something to the table.”
Cyrus said that for her relationships with females “make more sense” and have been working better because the role she plays — for instance, how she’s the big breadwinner and pays for things. She’s not against a romance with a “boss bitch,” a woman more successful than she is, but she holds “a more dominant space” in relationships — even in the ones she has with men.
In the past, she said “it felt like I was choosing partners out of anxiety.” And with any future males that she dates, “I need a guy that’s confident enough in himself that he’s OK that i’m kind of masculine, strong and there are a lot of qualities in me that you tend to associate more with the male role.”
She added, “I’ve been very experimental. I just really don’t have a type” other than requiring that the person “is elevating my life.”
And it’s also important to her the way the person takes care of themselves, calling it “a reflection of the way they’ll treat you.” She said as someone “living a sober lifestyle,” something she started earlier this year, “dont go to the club looking for you next partner. Put yourself in places where you’ll be successful. You can really control the flow of people in and out of your life.”
When it comes to handling breakups, Cyrus said her go-to is making lists.
“i try to not get lost in the emotion,” Cyrus said, noting that she’s very logical and organized. “Make a list of what you are gaining and what you are losing [with the breakup]. What they were contributing to your life and what they were subtracting.”
Just ahead of her new song’s release, she confirmed her split with Simpson, who she started dating last fall after her romance with Kaitlynn Carter ended.
On an Instagram Live, Cyrus said, "A year ago, almost to this exact date, the media tried to tell my story for me, and control my narrative, and I'm just not accepting that. And so today, it came out that me and my boyfriend have broken up. It was confirmed by a 'reliable source' even though no one is reliable in a relationship except the individuals who are participating in it. But right now, two halves can't make a whole and we're individually just working on ourselves to become the people that we wanna be, like everybody else at this age. We are just deciding who we wanna be with our lives, what we wanna do with our lives, and so, don't make it some drama story if next week we're out hanging out, getting pizza. We've been friends for 10 years and we're going to continue to be friends, so just don't make it something that it is not."
The Australian singer made his own sweet statement, offering support for Cyrus’s new song. He wrote, “So proud of you. Congratulations to the most special of all.”
Cyrus of course talked about “Midnight Sky,” which dropped on Friday, and hears her singing, “I was born to run. I don’t belong to anyone.” In it, she sings about being with both a man and woman.
She called the song a “pansexual, bisexual anthem” and says it “plays with gender roles. It’s unapologetically saying in the chorus, My lips on her mouth. He’s got his hands on my waist.’”
She added, “There are just not songs for people who can identity with these lyrics. So I thought it was a really empowering thing for me and then my listeners.”
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