The singer split from Max Ehrich last year and now considers herself 'too queer' to date a cis man.
Demi Lovato's recent split helped her embrace her sexuality. The 28-year-old singer covers the March issue of Glamour, and reveals how the September 2020 end of her engagement to Max Ehrich allowed her to become more herself.
"When I started getting older, I started realizing how queer I really am," she says. "This past year I was engaged to a man, and when it didn’t work, I was like, 'This is a huge sign. I thought I was going to spend my life with someone. Now that I wasn’t going to, I felt this sense of relief that I could live my truth."
Lovato notes that she considers herself "really queer," and even "too queer" to be with a cis man at this point in her life.
"I hooked up with a girl and was like, 'I like this a lot more.' It felt better. It felt right," she says. "Some of the guys I was hanging out with, when it would come time to be sexual or intimate, I would have this kind of visceral reaction. Like, 'I just don’t want to put my mouth there.'"
"It wasn’t even based on the person it was with," Lovato continues. "I just found myself really appreciating the friendships of those people more than the romance, and I didn’t want the romance from anybody of the opposite sex."
While Lovato says that she knows "who I am and what I am" in regards to her sexuality, she's not ready to publicly share that label just yet.
"I’m just waiting until a specific timeline to come out to the world as what I am," she says. "I’m following my healers’ timeline, and I’m using this time to really study and educate myself on my journey and what I’m preparing to do."
Part of that journey, Lovato says, is learning to trust herself and her intuition.
"I denied my intuition of all the red flags that had popped up. I had no one else to blame but myself," she says of her engagement to Ehrich. "So I was like, 'How am I ever going to trust again?' But really, I was like, 'B**ch, you should have trusted yourself. If you had trusted yourself, you wouldn’t have ended up in this position.'"
According to Lovato, learning that lesson and embracing who she is has left her heart "pretty open."
"I’m very much listening to my intuition, and that’s not to say my boundaries or my guard is up. It’s just saying my ears are perked a little higher and my eyes are open a little wider," she explains.
In both her personal and professional lives, Lovato is now focused on making choices that make her "the happiest." Being happy and being herself are conscious choices she made after her overdoses, rehab stints and eating disorder struggles, which all came amid her tumultuous love life.
"I was trying on different identities that felt authentic to me but weren’t me," she says of her past attempts to be who she thought the world wanted her to be. "... When I ignore and deny myself of my truth, I get angry and I overflow, and I make choices that are really bad for me. If I look in the mirror and present the mirror with something I’m not, it will shatter."
Now that she's gotten to the place where she enjoys food without judgment and has opted to "try this balance thing in the substance side" of her life, Lovato feels more confident about herself and her music than ever before.
"I’m the type of person that when you take something out of my life, something else just becomes more beautiful," she says. "I think that when the universe shuts one door, it opens another or there’s a window to open. It just depends on your perspective and how you choose to look at it."
"Autonomy, for me, is what changed my life," she adds. "... Nothing people say or do is going to really change the way I live."
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