Julianne Hough Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for GLAAD
Julianne Hough had a “beautiful revelation” that led her to understand that she was “not straight.”
“We were married [at the time],” Hough, 36, said during a recent appearance on the “Jamie Kern Lima” podcast, referring to then-husband Brooks Laich. “Coming out is one of the most vulnerable and empowering things that you can do. I think, for me, it’s not about being straight or gay or queer, it’s more about I’m learning what love is, and I love people.”
The Dancing With the Stars pro-turned-host further revealed that she initially didn’t “know what [she’s] attracted to” but chose to stay with Laich, now 41.
“That is the freedom of the love that I was starting to experience in seeing people because I was able to take off a level of protection instead of being so internalized,” she said. “So, I was starting to see people and seeing their hearts and seeing their beauty and their essence. I was like, ‘Wow, I love people and I don’t know if it’s a sexual attraction or this attraction, but I’m just seeing people.’ That was, like, such a beautiful revelation.”
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Hough publicly came out in a September 2019 profile for Women’s Health, noting that she told Laich that she was “not straight.” In January 2020, Laich exclusively told Us Weekly that Hough’s “beautiful” explanation inspired him to be a better person and that he always accepted her “heart.”
“I’ve always loved people, but I haven’t just been, like, still and allowed them to just be seen and just see their essence and their beauty,” Hough noted to host Jamie Kern Lima earlier this month. “It wasn’t just, like an exchange of fun energy. … The more I was starting to connect to the 28- [or] 29-year-old in me, I was able to start seeing other people that way too.”
Julianne Hough Jamie McCarthy/WireImage
Seeing individuals’ “souls” helped unravel new feelings in Hough. “I had all these activations start happening,” she recalled. “I was starting to have these beautiful oneness experiences with people where I would be sitting there having a conversation and I’d be, like, thinking of a black-and-white dog and the number 12 would come up. I’d be like, ‘Did you have a dog that was black-and-white at 12?’ And they’d be like, ‘Wait, what? How did you know that?’”
Hough was subsequently inspired to explore the “wild journey” of her curiosity.
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“I wanted to understand all these different modalities of ways to connect to yourself more and be able to trust yourself more,” Hough said. “As I was going through that and de-layering all these things, my ex was contracting because he had just got let go from playing hockey and he was going through [an] identity shift.”
According to Hough, she and Laich stopped seeing eye-to-eye and were “doing [their] own thing.” (Hough and Laich split in May 2020, finalizing their divorce two years later.)
“We’ve had this conversation now that we wish we would have had the maturity to come together,” Hough said. “And that there would have potentially been a different outcome. But, I think everything has happened the way it should have happened.”
