Ariana Grande rarely opens up about her personal life in interviews, but in a just-released cover story with Vogue US, the ‘Thank U, Next’ singer got candid about not only losing her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller to an accidental overdose last September, but her whirlwind relationship with SNL comedian Pete Davidson and why that romance didn’t last.
The 26-year-old explained that her headline spot at Coachella in April was hard because the festival reminds her heavily of Miller, who she watched perform there two years in a row – the pair confirmed their split one month after they were spotted together at Coachella in 2018. “I never thought I’d even go to Coachella,” she said.
“I was always a person who never went to festivals and never went out and had fun like that. But the first time I went was to see Malcolm perform, and it was such an incredible experience. I went the second year as well, and I associate…heavily…it was just kind of a mindfuck, processing how much has happened in such a brief period.”
Later, Grande opened up about the statement she made on Twitter at the end of May 2018, after fans criticised her for leaving Miller when he was clearly struggling with substance abuse issues.
At the time, she wrote in part: ‘How absurd that you minimise female self-respect and self-worth by saying someone should stay in a toxic relationship because he wrote an album about them, which btw the isn’t the case (just Cinderella is ab[out] me). I am not a babysitter or a mother and no woman should feel that they need to be. I have cared for him and tried to support his sobriety and prayed for his balance for years (and always will of course) but shaming/blaming women for a man’s inability to keep his shit together is a very major problem.’
“People don’t see any of the real stuff that happens, so they are loud about what they think happened. They didn’t see the years of work and fighting and trying, or the love and exhaustion,” she told Vogue. That tweet came from a place of complete defeat, and you have no idea how many times I warned him that that would happen and fought that fight, for how many years of our friendship, of our relationship. You have no idea so you’re not allowed to pull that card, because you don’t fucking know. That’s where that came from.”
The interview also revealed that Grande’s friends said the singer was up at all hours while on her Dangerous Woman tour, trying “to ensure [Miller] wasn’t on a bender.”
“By no means was what we had perfect, but, like, fuck. He was the best person ever, and he didn’t deserve the demons he had,” Grande said of Miller’s passing, saying her grief is “pretty all-consuming – I was the glue for such a long time, and I found myself becoming…less and less sticky. The pieces just started to float away.”
Of her relationship with Pete Davidson, who she started dating in May 2018, before getting engaged in June of that year and ultimately ending their relationship four months later, in October, Grande said, “it was frivolous and fun and insane and highly unrealistic.”
“I loved him, and I didn’t know him. I’m like an infant when it comes to real life and this old soul, been-around-the-block-a-million-times artist. I still don’t trust myself with the life stuff.”
This article originally appeared on InStyle Australia
