Emily Ratajkowski has opened up about what changed in her life after her divorce, sharing candid new details about sex, dating and motherhood in a personal essay.
The model and actor split from film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard in 2022, several years after their surprise courthouse wedding in February 2018 and around a year after welcoming their son, Sylvester Apollo Bear, in March 2021.
In the time since, she has been romantically linked with several well-known names, among them Brad Pitt and Pete Davidson.
She was also seen with comedian Eric André in January 2023, though that relationship ended not long afterward.
Ratajkowski has now shared more about her dating life and the end of her marriage in a personal essay for The Cut, which was published on 12 June 2026 under the title Mother F—er: After becoming a single mom, I began compulsively dating in order to figure out what kind of woman I wanted to be.
“It was a violent transition into a new reality of screaming baby on my aching t*t and ring on my swollen finger. And then, in a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed.”
She wrote that she and Bear-McClard had ‘stopped having sex’ six months after their child was born, before separating the following year.
The essay also touches on how she felt judged after the breakup, saying people often viewed her in a ‘condescending way’ and treated her as though she was ‘unwanted’ or had ‘been left’.
Elsewhere, Ratajkowski said that before the separation, she had ‘never had a one night stand’.
She also explained that she ‘came to resent deeply the naïveté and inequality that being a good girl left me with,’ and told friends that she ‘just needed a distraction’.
One section of the essay describes a night when she returned to a man’s apartment after they had gone out for drinks together.
“I was especially satisfied by his expression when he looked down at me,” she said, as she detailed an intimate encounter the two had – as he told her she ‘looked like Cleopatra’ as she was performing the intimate act.
The piece has quickly generated online reaction because of how directly Ratajkowski writes about post-divorce sex and the pressure she felt to redefine herself after becoming a single mother. It also continues themes she explored in her 2021 essay collection My Body, in which she wrote about fame, image, sexuality and control.
A year after the divorce, the now 35-year-old also posted on TikTok saying it was ‘chic’ to be divorced by the age of 30.
Her video came shortly after Joe Jonas filed for divorce from Sophie Turner in September 2023, and included her thoughts on how many ‘ladies’ were ending marriages before turning 30.
“As someone who got married at 26 and has been separated for a little over a year, at 32, I don’t think there’s anything better,” she said.
“Being in your 20s is the trenches, there is nothing better than being in your thirties still being hot, [writing *having boundaries], maybe having a little bit of your own money, figuring out what you want to do with your life – everything.”
She later added that some people come to see the ‘marriage fantasy’ they had pursued ‘might not be all it’s cracked up to be,’ while encouraging others by reminding them they still have their ‘whole life ahead of them’.
Ratajkowski, who was born on 7 June 1991, had just turned 35 before the essay was published, making the reflection one of her most personal public comments yet on the years since her marriage ended.