Miley Cyrus dishes on the roller coaster, the trauma-filled "period of self-realization" of the last few years and how she's emerging stronger. The 27-year-old singer opened up in a series of new interviews promoting her latest music about everything from making her house burn down and the prospect of adopting kids, to her heavily scrutinized divorce from Australian actor Liam Hemsworth and what she is searching for in her next partner.
Since dating on and off for a decade, Cyrus and Hemsworth tied the knot in December 2018 but the actor filed for divorce from Cyrus nearly a year ago.
"I had a very public, very large breakup that was over a 10-year span of a relationship," she said, while discussing how she copes on the Call Her Daddy podcast with heartbreak. "I'm very logical, very structured and I love lists. I have a list per day of, 'What do I want? How do I achieve this? What is the next move, then? And I tried not to get lost in the feeling, with heartbreak.
"When you lose a loved one it's like a death — it's that deep," she continued. "This feels like death. So, in order not to get lost in the emotion [and] reflect on the facts, make a list of what you won and what you lost.What they added to your life and what they subtracted — and weight each of those items by 1 to 10, then sum it all up. Unless the person added more to your life then you know what the next relationship needs. So, when they subtracted, you 're not going to consider ever again.
Cyrus faced the added challenge of public attention when it came to her breakup with Hemsworth, particularly around the way she quickly moved on with Kaitlynn Carter. Cyrus said in defending her behavior that Carter made her "very happy at the moment," and that being a woman made her potentially vulnerable to heightened scrutiny.
"There's no handbook on how to treat heartbreak," she said. "As a woman, I feel like I have been villainized for moving on. They made me appear unfaithful to them, which is against my f**king nature. You are targeting my f**king character and all is my life. It's my base.'
Cyrus found romance with Australian musician Cody Simpson after breaking up with Carter but on Friday a source told ET that the pair had split.
Now that she's single again, Cyrus told Call Her Daddy that she's looking for a partner who can look after herself, eat cleanly and be sober, joking that she won't hit AA meetings or Burger King to find such a guy.
"On their path towards sobriety, I don't want to help them, because I'm working on my own," she said. "As someone who lives the sober lifestyle, don't find your next partner in the bar — put yourself in ways where you're going to thrive. You should regulate the people who are going to come into your life and I decide who is coming in and who is not.
Do not expect Cyrus to go down the aisle with them if and when she meets the special guy. The former Hannah Montana star said in an interview with SiriusXM's The Morning Mash Up that she no longer "really thinks about marriage and stuff like that." She also answered "not necessarily" when asked if she wanted to remarry and have children.
"I have never ever cared [for] so much," said Cyrus. "I'm sure my fans will pull me up at 12 thinking, 'I want to have babies,' but like, I don't — as a woman of 27 [with] more of a practical view of what they want. It was never a priority for me.'
"Just look at our climate change and our water and food, if anything, I 'd like to take someone on Earth," Cyrus added. "I love adoption, and I think it's awesome really. I am not judging someone who wants to have kids. I honestly don't think that's a priority in my life for me.
Her goals are something about which Cyrus is much clearer due to the extra downtime that the coronavirus pandemic has provided.
Following the last two years of "some stressful events," including her divorce and loss of her Malibu , California, home in the 2018 Woolsey fire, the pause has given her time to gain much-needed "clarity."
"It was important for me to finally be able to sit down with my thoughts," she said. "I think one thing about this time that we all had was really interesting is, originally we all started basically cleaning the house. So so, if you were no longer able to do so, you had to go inside yourself and start picking up what you've been hanging on to for too long — things that belong to you, things that don't and things that don't represent you anymore.
"It was really, really good for me," she continued, adding that doing so while being sober was significant. "I don't think I could have done that if my mother hadn't smoked all of my weeds and I hadn't left any! With Zane Lowe on Apple Music, Cyrus shared more about the intense time she experienced while promoting her latest song, "Midnight Sky."
"In this time particularly, we are all changing at a pace," she said.
"Everyone feels like we're expanding. We state what we find acceptable, and not where our principles and values are.
With this album, it was particularly important to me because speaking directly about 'Midnight Sky,' I felt like my story had been revealed to me in the past year."
"Clearly I had a really public breakup and, even more so, a divorce — and with someone I 'd been dating for 10 years," Cyrus added. "The story and the 10 year experience was revealed to me from a helicopter 's eyes by one day."
Cyrus tried to take hold of his story with her new songs. "I just had to tackle the loss of my Malibu home," she told Lowe. "Throughout my life I had to resolve the loss of a relationship. I had to be human and experience and evolve, but then I decided to say it directly from my mouth and not through the concept of public opinion, because my story has been told a lot in my career by interpretation of the media. I just want the control back. I think this is what a lot of women do now.