“I remember when I decided to break things off, I had a lot of these Brentwood moms and producers in that world that were like, ‘What are you doing … Your life is completely set up!”‘

Julianne Hough is opening up about her past relationship with Ryan Seacrest.

While sitting down with Dax Shepard for his Armchair Expert podcast, the 36-year-old looked back on her relationship with the television host and producer.

The pair went through Hough’s life and her journey to fame. She brought up how she began dating Seacrest early on in her pursuit to be a country music singer.

“And was dating Seacrest … I would imagine 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,” Shepard asked Hough.

“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,” she responded as Shepard added that Hough was meeting “fantastic person after fantastic person.”

“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,” Hough said.

While she was dating Seacrest, Hough admitted she didn’t want people to think she was “using” him.

“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,” she said.

The dancer and actress dated the 49-year-old from 2010 to 2013.

“What I’ve realized over the years is I don’t know if I’ve ever truly been in love with someone, but I have loved the feeling of being loved — and so let me be what that needs to be so that I can be loved,” Hough said. “And then because I’m so filled with love from someone, of course I love you. I love everyone. I’ve been in love with everyone I’ve ever dated, but have I? I don’t want to overanalyze it, because every person I’ve also dated has been a very good person.”

Hough further analyzed her past and revealed that she was “oblivious” and “dissociative” with her behavior with relationships that she was unaware that it was a “repeated pattern”.

“I had no idea that was, like, a repeated pattern. Eventually, I remember when I decided to break things off, I had a lot of these Brentwood moms and producers in that world that were like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ They’re like, ‘Your life is completely set up,’” Hough recalled being told. “And I was like, ‘But I didn’t build it.’ I was like, ‘I need to create this. Competitively, it’s not mine. I need to feel the pride of doing it.’”

Hough went on to marry NHL player Brooks Laich in 2017 however, the pair split in 2019, publicly announcing it in May 2020.

“That was the year [2017] we got married and the year everything kinda started to unravel,” she told Shepard.

“It wasn’t right. That can be a hard thing to fully accept,” she said. “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.”

Five months after sharing their separation, Hough filed for divorce from Laich which was finalized in June 2022.