Spilling The TeaEverything Miley Cyrus Has Said About Splitting From Liam Hemsworth After 10 Years Together

Miley Speaks Out

Immediately following their breakup, Miley posted a lengthy rant on Twitter on August 22, 2019, in which she denied being unfaithful to Liam before their ultimate split.

“I can admit to a lot of things but I refuse to admit that my marriage ended because of cheating,” she wrote in part. “Liam and I have been together for a decade. I’ve said it before & it remains true, I love Liam and always will. BUT at this point I had to make a healthy decision for myself to leave a previous life behind. I am the healthiest and happiest I have been in a long time.”

New Relationships

After moving on with other relationships, Miley told her Twitter followers to “get used to [her] dating” in October 2019.

“I was in a committed relationship for almost all my teens and early 20s; with the exception of a few breaks, which usually in those times I was working my ass off with not much R&R … and meeting / trusting people in my position is really tuff,” she said at the time. “Don’t f—king pity me, not what I’m asking for. I have a great life I wouldn’t trade for ‘privacy’ but PLEASE don’t make this awkward for me!”

Making Music

The songstress spoke more in depth about her divorce with Zane Lowe on August 14, 2020.

“Obviously, I went through an extremely public breakup and, even more than that, a divorce, and with someone that I had been with for 10 years,” Miley recalled on the “New Music Daily” podcast. “I felt kind of villainized. I also felt like I kind of shut down because it was kind of, respectfully, below me to engage with the press and the media at that time.”

After the split, Miley said she put her feelings into her music.

“It felt like I would rather be able to articulate this experience in a poetic way that also I can put back into my art,” she explained. “I never really have engaged. I’ve only played with the public and the perception in that way.”

‘Slide Away’

While chatting with Zane, the former Disney star revealed that she actually wrote the breakup anthem “Slide Away” before splitting with Liam even though she released it after.

“I wrote ‘Slide Away’ before my breakup,” she recalled. “I wrote ‘Slide Away’ in February of the year before. And I just keep speaking these things into existence.”

Losing Their Love

Miley admitted that losing Liam felt “like a death.”

“I had a very public, very big breakup that was a 10-year span of a relationship. I tried not to get lost in the emotion… It’s like a death when you lose a loved one, it’s that deep. It feels like a death,” she said while appearing on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast on August 14, 2020. “Honestly, sometimes [death] even feels easier because [with a breakup] the person is still walking on the earth.”

Her First

She also recalled losing her virginity to Liam.

“I didn’t go all the way with a dude until I was 16,” the actress also said on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “It wasn’t Nick Jonas, but I ended up marrying the guy. So that’s pretty crazy.”

A Long-Term Love

Following their split, Miley also said she “never really cared that much” about getting married or having kids.

“I just personally don’t believe that’s a priority for me in my life … For me I don’t just really think about marriage and things like this anymore,” she said while on SiriusXM’s Morning Mashup on August 15, 2020. “That ‘forever,’ if it’s not successful or if you claimed something to be forever and you fail, then you’re a failure. And I just don’t think that.

She continued, “I think we’re kind of set up for devastation — in that, from the time we’re little kids, we’re taught to claim other humans as our best friends forever. And you just don’t know who you’re going to be sitting with here right now. You never know who you’re going to evolve to be and who they’re going to evolve to be. So I think that we, especially as women in relationships, a lot of the time we can get villainized when ‘forever’ doesn’t happen. And I think that you’re just really setting yourself up to kind of be disappointed — and not from a bitter or resentful way, but from a realistic and logical standpoint, especially in modern society.”

Her Career

“When I look at my career, there was really a two year or one year period that doesn’t really make sense. I think you and I probably know that it has to do kind of with that more like Younger Now, kind of ‘Malibu’ era,” she explained to MTV during an interview on August 20, 2020. “I think what happened in that, which does happen to a lot of people, and it’s not to villainize the partner, but you lose yourself in someone else sometimes.”

Her ‘Public Divorce’

While appearing on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, Miley said the hardest part about the divorce was how public it became.

“I recently just went through a very public divorce that f–king sucked,” she said. “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.”

‘Trauma’ and ‘Loss’

While chatting with Scandanavian talk show Skavlan in November 2020, Miley opened up about her split.

“I’ve gone through a lot of kind of trauma and loss in the last couple years. I had a house fire in Malibu, where I lost my house and went through a divorce recently, my grandma who I was super close with, I lost.”

She continued, “In a way, I didn’t spend too much time crying over it, and it wasn’t because I was cold or trying to avoid feeling something, but it was just because it wasn’t going to change it. I tried to just continue to be active in what I can control, otherwise you just start feeling like you’re trapped.”

Reflecting on Their Romance

During a December 2020 interview on The Howard Stern Show, Miley reflected on her relationship with Liam. After the 2019 fire that burnt down their California home together, the songstress said she “clung to what I had left of that house, which was me and him.”

“And I really do and did love him very, very, very much and still do, always will,” Miley added. She went on to say that their split stemmed from “too much conflict.”

“When I come home, I want to be anchored by someone,” she said. “I don’t get off on drama or fighting.”

Reflecting on Their House

During the interview for Miley’s Rolling Stone magazine cover, she said that marrying Liam was “one last attempt” to save herself after losing her house in the fire.

“In a way, it did what I couldn’t do for myself,” she said, referring to the Malibu fire. “It removed me from what no longer was serving its purpose. And then as you drown, you reach for that lifesaver and you want to save yourself. I think that’s really what, ultimately, getting married was for me. One last attempt to save myself.”

When She Knew

In a TikTok posted in September 2023, Miley revealed the moment when she knew her marriage to Liam was over was while she was performing at Glastonbury music festival in June 2019.

“Glastonbury was in June,” she began, “which was when the decision had been made.”

She explained that after the November 2018 California wildfires destroyed the couple’s home, the pair were married. “Me and Liam’s commitment to being married, of course came from a place of love first because we had been together for 10 years, but also from a place of trauma and just trying to rebuild as quickly as we could,” she revealed.  “The day of the [Glastonbury] show was the day I had decided it was no longer going to work in my life to be in that relationship.”