Chelsea Handler is shedding light on her July breakup from Jo Koy.
During an appearance on Brooke Shields‘ Now What? podcast, the comedian revealed that she felt the two didn’t align on some important aspects.
“There were just some behaviors that we couldn’t agree on, and it felt to me like I would have to abandon myself—which maybe I would have been OK to do if I were 20 or 25—but I wasn’t willing to do that,” the 47-year-old explained on the Dec. 27 episode, per Entertainment Tonight. “No matter how much I loved this person, and I loved him so much, I was not going to abandon myself.”
Chelsea continued, “I was like, ‘I’m not going to change this, I’m not going to change the way that I behave in order to make you feel more comfortable. I’m not doing that.’ And I had to walk away from something that I really believed was gonna be a forever relationship, and so that was difficult.”
Though she said she and Jo even tried therapy and “any avenue I could think of” to try and make their relationship work, she eventually realized their efforts were “futile.”
While Chelsea didn’t reveal exactly what the two disagreed on, she cryptically admitted “walking away from him was one of the most difficult things that I ever had to do.”
Chelsea and Jo, 51, frequently appear on Chelsea Lately, which ran from 2007 to 2014. Their relationship grew from platonic to romantic during the pandemic. “When he was leaving, I was like, ‘That’s a bummer,'” the E! News cover starexclusively shared. “Or if I didn’t hear from him for a couple of days, I was like, ‘Where’s Jo Koy? He’s usually up my ass.’ And then I started to realize, ‘Oh, he’s not annoying me.'”
Over the summer, however, Chelsea announced their split ahead of their one-year anniversary.
“To be loved and adored by @jokoy has been one of the greatest gifts of my life,” she wrote in July. “He renewed my faith in men, in love, in being 100% who I am, and I’ve never been more optimistic for the future. Jo- you blew my creativity open, my lust for working hard again, being on the road again, and you reminded me who I was and always have been, and my feet have never been more firmly planted in the ground.”
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