In her new documentary, Dancing with the Devil, Demi Lovato has opened up about herself and her near-fatal 2018 overdose in detail for the first time.
Lovato also talked about her short-lived engagement to actor Max Ehrich who proposed in July last year after four months of dating.
The Sorry Not Sorry singer publicly spoke about the lead-up to and aftermath of the incident, revealing she suffered three strokes and a heart attack that night and still deals with brain damage and partial blindness.
As reported by Buzzfeed, the pair announced their engagement with a photoshoot and matching Instagram posts in which Lovato said “I knew I loved you the moment I met you” and showed off her very sizeable ring. Just two months later, the couple split. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly published on Thursday, the singer opened up about her engagement to Ehrich, admitting that it was at least partially an attempt to “prove to the world [she was] OK.”
“I really had myself fooled,” Demi said of her engagement, “because it was the safe and expected thing.”
“Obviously I cared deeply about the person,” she went on. “But there was something inside of me that was like, ‘I have to prove to the world that I’m OK.'”
“Now that I’m not engaged or married and I’m OK, I’m like, ‘Wow. Isn’t that so much more empowering?” Lovato mused. “It’s not this false sense of security.” She continued to say that the size of her engagement ring made everything “really real” and she realised it wasn’t something she needed the second she took it off.
“The second it was off, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m good. I don’t need that,'” Demi said.
“I just don’t need an object on my finger to make me feel like I’ve got my s**t together,” she explained. “It looks like stability, but it doesn’t mean that it is. And I don’t actually grow through stability. I find that I like living not in chaos or crisis, but in fluidity.”
“It’s not [being] stuck and stagnant in an ideal or a tradition that was placed upon us by the patriarchy,” she added.
Since the split with Ehrich, Lovato said she has become more comfortable with publicly expressing her “really, really queer” side. “Regardless if drama is happening or not, I am too gay to marry a man right now,” Demi told EW. “I don’t know if that will change in 10 years and I don’t know if that’ll never change, but I love accepting myself.”
“I’ve always known I was hella queer,” she added. “But I have fully embraced it.”
The end of the couple’s engagement is something she discusses in Dancing with the Devil, during which she tearfully admits she “didn’t actually know the person [she was] engaged to.”
“I think I rushed into something that I thought was what I was supposed to do,” Lovato says in the documentary. “I realized as time went on that I didn’t actually know the person that I was engaged to.”
She goes on to say that she was “just as shocked as the rest of the world” at Ehrich’s public reaction to their breakup.
At the time, he claimed in several statements on his Instagram account that he had found out about their breakup from tabloids. He was also papped dramatically crying on the beach where they got engaged, and at one point commented on one of Demi’s Instagram posts telling her to stop “exploiting [their] breakup for clout.”
According to EW, there’s a song called “15 Minutes” on Lovato’s upcoming album Dancing with the Devil… The Art of Starting Over, which will be released on April 2.
“Good riddance,” Lovato reportedly sings on the track. “You got your 15 minutes.” /TISG