Selena Gomez Opens Up About Her Breakup with Justin Bieber
While she didn’t name names in a new interview with Ryan Seacrest, it was pretty obvious who she was talking about.
This week, Selena Gomez released two new singles after a four-year-long break from music. Both new tracks–”Lose You to Love Me” and “Look At Her Now”–seem to touch on the star’s breakup with former long-term on-again-off-again boyfriend Justin Bieber. And in a new interview with Ryan Seacrest on Thursday morning, she really opened up about the dissolution of their relationship, and what it was like to watch Bieber move on quickly with Hailey Baldwin (now Bieber), who he married in 2018.
Seacrest asked Gomez about a lyric from “Lose You to Love Me” that caused widespread fan speculation: “You turned me down, and now it’s showing / In two months you replaced us / Like it was easy.” Bieber and Gomez broke up for good around April of 2018, and he began dating Baldwin in June. They were married at a New York City courthouse that September, and had a more formal celebration in South Carolina this past September.
Gomez and Seacrest didn’t name Bieber directly, but the reference was pretty transparent. “The two months lyric would be worse for us than going through a breakup, is having to see someone with someone else so fast,” Seacrest said.
“Yeah, I think you know, I’m really grateful too because I’ve actually experienced that a million times before,” Gomez replied. “And that’s the unfortunate part about what I do. So it’s all very real to me, and I’m sure it’s just entertainment for other people, but I just—I think I had become numb to it, and it would be stupid of me if I didn’t acknowledge what I had felt because it would be inauthentic, and that’s everything I claim to be and do.”
“I know there are thousands of people, men and women, who have felt this feeling, and it’s extremely real, and on top of the social media and everything, it doesn’t matter if you’re in my position or if you’re in someone’s because you’re always going to somehow find this negative space,” she continued. “It’s just that’s what—that’s why I have to be careful, and I just have to take steps back and just focus on what I’m doing and no one else.”
Seacrest also asked Gomez about how she deals with intense fan reactions to deeply personal lyrics. “I don’t know, Ryan, I just do it,” she said. “But I think that’s why I waited this long to kind of express what I felt because I’m—I don’t know. I think that’s the whole point. I’m always going to be honest with people. I’ve never not been. I might not be overly chatty about it all the time, but this is where I’m able to release it. This is where it turns into art.”
“And it actually shocks me,” she continued. “Some of the reaction I feel like shocks me in general because I’ve dealt with this for years now, because everyone writes about something they felt, everyone. And the biggest topic is love and in a way, it’s not something negative. It’s actually something positive that I was able to experience that, as beautiful and ugly as it was. I think it’s beautiful that I’ve been able to turn this into a new chapter.”
