A Look Back at Miranda Lambert’s Relationships

Miranda Lambert’s love life is back in the headlines this year, thanks to her surprise marriage to Brendan McLoughlin.

The wedding comes seven months after her relationship with musician Evan Felker, who was allegedly still married to wife Staci Nelson when he and Lambert began dating, came to an end.

Felker filed for divorce from Nelson in February, according to E! News, and his band, the Turnpike Troubadours, served as opening act on Lambert’s Livin’ Like Hippies tour on select dates in early February. A source told Us Weekly that things just “happened” between the pair while Lambert was still technically with now-ex Anderson East.

Unfortunately, the short-lived relationship with Felker and the quick marriage to a NYPD police officer are not Lambert’s first relationship decisions to raise eyebrows. Scroll through to find out a little more about the highs and lows in Lambert’s past.

Blake Shelton

Shelton was still married to first wife Kaynette Gern when Lambert first fell for him, while they were performing for the televised CMT 100 Greatest Duets Concert in 2005. The pair sang “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” together for the special.

“I knew he was married,” Lambert said on Dateline in 2011, via E! News. “I had seen their wedding picture in Country Weekly. I knew better, like, this is off limits. My parents are private investigators for God’s sake. I’ve seen this my whole life – affairs. Of all people to know better, I know better than this.”

“I’ve never had that kind of experience with anybody,” Shelton said of performing with Lambert in an interview with VH1’s Behind the Music in 2011. “I was a married guy, you know? Standing up there and singing with somebody and going, ‘Man, this shouldn’t be happening.’ Looking back on that, I was falling in love with her, right there on stage.”

Blake Shelton

The pair tied the knot in 2011 at Don Strange Ranch in Lambert’s home state of Texas. While the pair had previously admitted that being in a relationship with a fellow country artist wasn’t the easiest thing, they asserted that they wanted to make it work.

“Miranda and I have a very interesting relationship,” Shelton told the Associated Press in 2007. “She can get so mad at me that she just wants to punch me in the face, and we’ll say that’s it. Then, 30 minutes later we’re calling each other and acting like it never happened. I think it’s that we’re both artists, and if I want to see her or she wants to see me, sometimes it just doesn’t work out and it’s frustrating.

He continued, “But I think she’s somebody that I’m going to have in my life a long time. She’s one of those few people you meet and have a connection with and you don’t really fully understand it, but you know it’s a pretty big deal.”

Blake Shelton

Speaking to Marie Claire in 2014, Lambert gushed about married life, calling Shelton her “perfect match.”

“I’m not sunshine and roses. Blake’s the happiest person on the planet,” she said. “He pulls me out of my darkness. Literally everything is the best about being married.”

In a 60 Minutes interview that aired in November 2014, Lambert noted that while the pair does share so much of their lives, they still need some privacy for themselves.

“We feel like we’re very honest with who we are and our relationship,” she said, via E! News. “We’ve kinda told the good, the bad, the ugly as our relationship has progressed from the beginning till now. And people dig anyway and they make up lies, so I feel like, we don’t really hold back, because if you hold back they’re going to dig anyway so might as well just tell it.

She continued, “The only private thing we have is our home and, if we don’t protect that, then we have nothing. We have to have something that’s just for us. At some point you just have to go ‘all right, this is it, this is our line, you know.’ We have our one little area of the world that no one can come into.”

Blake Shelton

Shelton and Lambert announced their divorce in 2015.

“This is not the future we envisioned,” the couples’ representatives told Us Weekly in a statement. “And it is with heavy hearts that we move forward separately. We are real people, with real lives, with real families, friends and colleagues. Therefore, we kindly ask for privacy and compassion concerning this very personal matter.”

Both Shelton and Lambert released emotional and personal albums after their divorce, with Shelton’s If I’m Honest arriving in May 2016 and Lambert’s critically acclaimed double album The Weight of These Wings dropping in November of that year.

“If you want to hear my side of the story or my opinion of what happened, it’s all on there,” she told Billboard in 2017. “There’s no mystery anymore—take from it what you will.”

Of his own record, which chronicled his divorce as well as the beginning of his relationship with Gwen Stefani, Shelton told Billboard, “You can learn some facts of my divorce [from the music]. Maybe not specifics, but you can get a general idea about it. It is my divorce record, but maybe even more than that, it’s my happy, falling-in-love record too.”

Anderson East

At the end of 2015, Lambert began dating singer Anderson East after meeting at a music event in Nashville.

Although Lambert’s Instagram feed was filled with pictures of East, the “Tin Man” singer said in an interview in 2016 that she wasn’t in a hurry to walk down the aisle again.

“I had a great relationship and an amazing man. So I know what good is,” she explained to Cosmopolitan in 2015, via Entertainment Tonight. “I have a great launching pad for the future. I will never take that for granted. I worked so hard in my 20s. I settled down. I got married. I lived that life. I moved to a farm in Oklahoma and had this strong career and home, and then all that shifted. Now I feel like I’m just getting started in my career. I have too much to say right now, which is a good place. When you feel that way, you have to use it. I’m just scratching the surface of where I can go.”

Anderson East

By early 2018, Lambert and East split, although neither party ever publicly commented on their breakup. But at a concert in March, Lambert admitted she wasn’t at her emotional best.

“I make it my mission every single time I step on the stage that no matter what, no matter where I am, I want to make you feel everything you could possibly feel. I want you to feel sad, mad, happy and nostalgic and really pissed sometimes. That’s my favorite,” Lambert said while speaking to the crowd between songs, according to Knox News. “And part of feelings is also heartbreak unfortunately, but fortunately for me, I can use it for my art or whatever. I like to write sad songs. I like to listen to sad songs, so I want to sing y’all one.”

Evan Felker

It was reported in June 2018 that Lambert and Felker were dating, with a source telling Us Weekly that “They are very much involved.”

The news caused some drama when it was revealed that Felker had filed for divorce from his wife in February, with Nelson filing later that same month.

After the reports began circulating, Nelson took to Instagram to seemingly comment on the situation, posting a teary selfie along with the caption, “PSA: If Staci Felker can make it through this week, so can you.”

Photo Credit: Debby Wong / Shutterstock.com

Brendan McLoughlin

On Saturday, Feb. 16, Lambert surprisingly announced she tied the knot with McLoughlin, who is believed to be a New York City police officer. Details of the marriage have been sparse, but Lambert shared two photos of the wedding on her Twitter page and another with PEOPLE. 

“In honor of Valentine’s Day I wanted to share some news. I met the love of my life. And we got hitched! My heart is full. Thank you Brendan McLoughlin for loving me for…. me,” Lambert wrote on Twitter, alongside the hashtag “the one” and a heart emoji.