Say it ain’t so! After six years together, Julianne Hough and her husband, Brooks Laich, have split. “We have lovingly and carefully taken the time we have needed to arrive at our decision to separate,” the pair said in a statement obtained by People on Friday, May 29,” adding that they “share an abundance of love and respect” for each other.
Julianne and Brooks had a particularly difficult year, including the deaths of their two dogs. “They’ve had so many ups and downs,” a source previously told Life & Style. “But they also have very different ways of dealing with them.”
Unfortunately for their marriage, one of those main differences was communication. “Julianne is an open book,” noted the insider. “Brooks was OK with that in the beginning, but it’s gotten to be too much.”
Prior to news of their breakup, Brooks took to Instagram ahead of New Year’s Eve to share his resolutions for 2020. “I want to learn more about intimacy and my sexuality,” the 36-year-old ice hockey player wrote, perhaps being inspired by Julianne’s own admission about her sexuality in August 2019.
“I [told him], ‘You know I’m not straight, right?’ And he was like, ‘I’m sorry, what?’ I was like, ‘I’m not. But I choose to be with you,’” the longtime dancer, 31, recalled to Women’s Health magazine. “I think there’s a safety with my husband now that I’m unpacking all of this, and there’s no fear of voicing things that I’ve been afraid to admit or that I’ve had shame or guilt about because of what I’ve been told or how I was raised.”
Ahead of telling Brooks, Julianne worried he wouldn’t accept her. “I was connecting to the woman inside that doesn’t need anything, versus the little girl that looked to him to protect me,” she confessed. “I was like, ‘Is he going to love this version of me?’ But the more I dropped into my most authentic self, the more attracted he was to me. Now, we have a more intimate relationship.”
We wish them both the best during this time.
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