Lauren Alaina Opens up About Broken Engagement to Alex Hopkins

Lauren Alaina and her ex Alex Hopkins ended their engagement earlier this year, and the singer opened up about the difficult split during an appearance on the All Our Favorite People podcast with Ashley Eicher and Hunter Kelly this week.

"We started dating at 17, and we're now 24 years old," she said. "We're very different people, and we have different goals, and we want to go different places in life. When we got engaged, it got really real. Not that it wasn't real before, but it was just like, 'Oh.' When you start planning your entire future and you're not agreeing on things, it's very hard. But he was all I knew, and I was all he knew."

The couple started dating in 2012 before getting engaged in July 2018. In October, Alaina's stepfather, Sam Ramker, passed away after a battle with cancer. Alaina resumed touring just one day after his funeral, explaining that she didn't fully deal with her grief before returning to the road.

"I was sobbing all the time," she recalled. "I would cry until the second I got on stage, and then I would turn it off, and I'd get off stage, and I'd cry myself to sleep."

Amidst Ramker's passing and her struggling relationship with Hopkins, Alaina went through a week of therapy at Onsite Workshops, which she said "changed my life in every way."

Now, the 24-year-old considers herself a work in progress and is feeling great about the place she's currently at.

"Last year was one of the hardest years of my life — maybe the hardest year of my life as an adult," Alaina said on the podcast, adding, "I'm the happiest I've ever been."

"I am literally so proud of the person that I am now. I've worked really hard on myself," she said. "And I think that we all should do that. We should all care about ourselves as much as we care about other people."

Alaina and Hopkins originally announced their split in January, one week after Alaina completed her time at Onsite.

"I'll love him until the day that I die," she said of Hopkins. "I will never look back on our time together and think that it was a waste, ever...He was such an important person in my life, but that just doesn't make him the person that I'm supposed to be with forever."

The "Ladies in the '90s" singer added that she's feeling particularly connected to Ariana Grande, who also recently called off an engagement, naming Grande's "Thank U, Next" as her current theme song.

"Any Ariana Grande song right now is like my life, because she just called off an engagement, too," she said, though she noted, "I think she's probably better at dating than me."

Alaina admitted that the idea of dating again is "problematic. It's not a skill that I have...I'm a very flirty person in general...[but] I've never had to flirt with intent."

Photo Credit: Getty / John Shearer