Kaitlynn Carter has published a new essay detailing her romance with Miley Cyrus. The reality star addressed the whole affair candidly for the first time in her article, which was published by Elle on Monday. The piece has some fans rethinking their impressions of the story.
Carter and Cyrus had a brief fling this year not long after Carter separated from ex-husband Brody Jenner. The star of The Hills: New Beginnings was seen kissing Cyrus in paparazzi photos, and hours later, Cyrus and her husband Liam Hemsworth announced they were separating. In her essay, Carter admitted that she felt seriously about Cyrus from the start.
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“This past July, I went on vacation with a female friend; the next thing I knew, I was in love with her,” she wrote.
Carter did not call out Cyrus by name in the essay, though given the timeline it seems unlikely she could be referring to anyone else, especially since she later called this her “first and only romance with a woman.”
This impassioned statement also flies in the face of previous reports which said that Cyrus and Carter were never that serious, and are now just friends. Carter went on to describe a journey of self-discovery.
“It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. But it also wasn’t very complicated, either,” Carter went on. “Until that trip, it had never crossed my mind that I was even capable of loving a woman the way I loved her. But after reflecting on my romantic history, I realized that I’ve never really had a ‘type.’”
Carter told her story in narrative form, saying that she and this friend were “trying to move past our respective breakups” as they traveled through Europe.
“I fell just as hard for her as I had the older man so many years before,” she wrote. “It was that same familiar force of nature; I didn’t have to think about a thing or over-analyze. It just happened and it felt exactly right. Reflecting back on our three-year friendship, I realized I’d always been drawn to her in a way I wasn’t with other friends, but until that trip it had never crossed my mind to think of her in a romantic sense.”
Carter reflected on a lot in her essay, but tried to keep things personal and not speak for others. She had an overall positive outlook as well, saying she is “eternally grateful to my most recent relationship for opening my eyes to this unexplored part of myself, and for inspiring a new level of self-discovery and wonder at all the possibilities of life.”
“I’ve been forced to get to know myself in a far deeper way than ever before, and not just in terms of my sexual preferences,” she continued. “I’ve also been forced to reckon with who I am as a person.”
However, Carter strongly denounced any claims that this was “merely a ‘summer fling’ or a ‘same-sex affair.’”
Carter encouraged readers to stay open-minded and honest with themselves, trying to “understand who exactly their most authentic selves are.”