Julianne Hough Spills Exactly Why She Broke Up With Ryan Seacrest & Brooks Laich!

Julianne Hough is putting all of her dirty relationship laundry out to dry!

While hanging out with Dax Shepard on Monday’s episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, Julianne dropped some major details about her past relationships with Ryan Seacrest and Brooks Laich! Ooh, juicy!

Let’s start with Ryan. Of course, you know the Dancing with the Stars pro-turned-host dated the TV presenter back in 2010 and they eventually split in 2013. Until now, though, we’ve been mostly blind as to what actually went down between the two.

Julianne, for the record, maintains that Ryan is an amazing guy and she holds no animosity towards him — and their breakup was way more complicated than met the eye:

“…dating Seacrest… it would be so exciting and so privileged and so romantic and then also I would feel like I was losing myself to all of that. That was exactly the dynamic. The rug was swept up from underneath me, and I was just flying and I was experiencing things that I didn’t even know existed. But then I had this insecurity that I was like, ‘I don’t ever want anybody to think that I’m with him for this reason.’ And so I then started playing smaller.”

The dancer admitted she didn’t want the world to think she was “using” the producer for fame since she was still up-and-coming at the time:

“I know that that was his experience in past situations and stuff, and so I again overcompensated, [I] was malleable to fit into exactly what somebody needed me to be for them to be happy.”

Oof. That’s a great way to lose your sense of self. And when you can’t have a healthy relationship with yourself, you can’t have a healthy relationship with someone else. It makes sense she decided she needed out.

After her breakup with the LIVE with Kelly and Mark host, she went on to date and eventually marry Brooks Laich, but that sadly ended in divorce. She revealed that took far less time to fall apart. She told Dax their relationship began “unraveling” as soon as they got hitched, and explained their streak of bad luck as individuals and as a couple:

“He was injured and then he got traded before his team that he had been there for almost 12 years won the Stanley Cup. It makes me want to cry because I feel for him so bad. That was in 2017. That was the year we got married and the year that everything started unraveling.”

Julianne said after that, when she finally asked for a separation from the NHL star in 2019, BOTH of her dogs, Lexi and Harley, died:

“It was very tragic. That was all kind of happening at the same time and it was an unraveling. Everything that I had ever known, that I had put in place for my control and my protection … I had this marriage to this guy who represented more of a father figure to me, and while he was changing, I was changing.”

Oh, plus the pandemic happened… which they spent several states apart. Julianne went on to say she felt like she’d been “uprooted”:

“I [felt like] I literally blew up my entire life and I have nothing.”

Despite feeling that maybe in “another time, another place” things could’ve worked out, she has “accepted” the end of that relationship and has no regrets. And even though she’s “sad” it didn’t “work out in the end”, the actress explained:

“I feel like our relationship and our marriage was exactly right, and the end of it is right, too. We both have regrets that it didn’t work out, because I don’t think we had the maturity to come together. He was contracting while I was expanding. We just couldn’t find each other in that.”

All in all, Julianne says she’s “only dated great human beings” in her life: