If you're a One Tree Hill fan, then you know the saga of Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray all too well. The two met on the show, fell in love IRL, and got hitched in April 2005. (This was after an engagement that lasted nearly a year, of course.) However, things didn't work out between the actors, and Bush filed for an annulment only five months later. But here's the awkward part: Murray didn't leave OTH until 2009, so he and Bush still had to film together for three more years. It's hard to avoid your ex when he's at the GD table read every morning, you know?
Bush has remained relatively tight-lipped about the relationship for obvious reasons. Her marriage to Murray became larger than life—a splashy slice of adolescent fodder that arguably overshadowed her projects in the mid-2000s. And, because we live in the era of nostalgia, this marriage that lasted five months and ended 11 years ago is still something the public finds fascinating.
The actress received a taste of this in 2014 when she opened up about the union on Watch What Happens Live. "We were two stupid kids who had no business being in a relationship in the first place," Bush said.
But Bush refuses to let this brief time in her life define her, which is exactly why she's opening up about it again in the latest issue of Cosmopolitan. In an essay for the magazine, Bush gets the most candid she's ever been about her marriage to Murray in order to show people the bigger picture: We are more than just one failed relationship.
"In my 20s, when I was starting out my career as an actor, I wasn’t looking for a relationship, but one found me and became serious, even though I hadn’t planned to settle down until my 30s," Bush writes. "But when the person you're with asks you to marry him, you think: This must be happening because it's supposed to."
She continues, "But I refuse to let that one relationship define me, which is why I’ve done my best to avoid discussing it for 10 years. The reality is that, yes, it was a massive event in my life. And the trauma of it was amplified by how public it became, which was incredibly foreign and bizarre to a girl who'd been just another college kid 24 months before her life blew up."
Bush reveals that a male friend at the time helped her heal by sending great books and recommending a meditation teacher. The introspection made Bush realize that the hunt for The One is futile and that we're meant to have many relationships with different people and take something away each time.
"I came to appreciate that relationships often serve a specific purpose at a certain point in time, for myriad reasons," she writes. "Some are meant to heal you, some are meant to teach you how to build yourself up, and some are meant to show you how to trust your own intuition.… Not every love can last forever."
And just as Sophia Bush views her marriage to Chad Michael Murray as a small facet of her existence, so should the public. People have a tendency to obsess over the personal lives of female celebrities and judge them based on their romantic relationships. Jennifer Aniston has been dealing with it for years. But hopefully Bush's essay makes folks see that it's ridiculous to characterize her based on one short-lived relationship from more than a decade ago.
