Ariana Grande Calls Pete Davidson Engagement an 'Amazing Distraction': 'It Was Highly Unrealistic'
Ariana Grande is opening up about her short-lived engagement to Pete Davidson.
The couple was first linked in May 2018, and got engaged less than a month later before calling it quits in October. Their split came weeks after the death of Grande’s former boyfriend Mac Miller, who died from an accidental drug overdose on Sept. 7.
In a new interview for Vogue‘s August cover story, the 26-year-old pop star explained that her romance with Davidson began after her friends convinced her to move to New York City during the summer of 2018 following her breakup with Miller.
“My friends were like, ‘Come! We’re gonna have a fun summer,'” Grande told the magazine. “And then I met Pete, and it was an amazing distraction. It was frivolous and fun and insane and highly unrealistic, and I loved him, and I didn’t know him.”
“I’m like an infant when it comes to real life and this old soul, been-around-the-block-a-million-times artist,” she continued. “I still don’t trust myself with the life stuff.”
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During the interview, Grande also opened up about coping with the aftermath of Miller’s death, calling her grief “all-consuming.” The rapper, who died at age 26, had struggled with drug use throughout his life.
“By no means was what we had perfect, but, like, f—,” Grande said. “He was the best person ever, and he didn’t deserve the demons he had. I was the glue for such a long time, and I found myself becoming… less and less sticky. The pieces just started to float away.”
The loss of Miller and Grande’s breakup with Davidson came over a year after Manchester terror attack, when a bomber killed 22 people and injured more than 500 at the singer’s Manchester stop of her Dangerous Woman tour in May 2017.
“It’s not my trauma,” Grande told Vogue. “It’s those families’. It’s their losses, and so it’s hard to just let it all out without thinking about them reading this and reopening the memory for them.”
Following the attack, Grande postponed dates of the tour to pay respect to the victims. Then, 12 days later, she returned to the U.K. to perform in the star-studded One Love Manchester benefit concert.
“I’m proud that we were able to raise a lot of money with the intention of giving people a feeling of love or unity, but at the end of the day, it didn’t bring anyone back,” she said. “Everyone was like, ‘Wow, look at this amazing thing,’ and I was like, ‘What the f— are you guys talking about?’ We did the best we could, but on a totally real level we did nothing.”
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“I have a lot to say that could probably help people that I do want to share, but I have a lot that I still need to process myself and will probably never be ready to talk about,” the musician continued. “For a long time I didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything, because I didn’t want to think about anything. I kind of just wanted to bury myself in work and not focus on the real stuff, because I couldn’t believe it was real.”
