Years after their engagement ended in early 2022, Aaron Rodgers is airing out his grievances with ex Shailene Woodley.
On Cam Heyward's "Not Just Football" podcast, the 42-year-old Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback alleged the actress, a couple of days after the engagement, expressed interest in being intimate with another unnamed man prior to their wedding.
"(Woodley) maybe felt like she was forced to make a decision; she could have said no," Rodgers, who is now married to a woman named Brittani, mused of the 2020 proposal. "Her story is I ruined her life and gave her crazy depression because I left her, but the actuality is, she told me that (statement) and she took off the ring by March."
USA TODAY has reached out to Woodley for comment.
While
it's impossible to analyze someone and their private relationship based on one public comment, experts say the situation reflects how feelings about a breakup can linger, especially if they haven't been properly processed.
The grief of a breakup doesn’t have a clean expiration date, explained Amy Chan, dating coach and author of "Unsingle: How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Last."
"If you don’t take the time and do the work to process that grief (and) look at your own patterns and how you contributed to the problems of the relationship, then you can distract or avoid your pain. But that pain doesn’t just go away because of time. It stays in you, it becomes baggage," Chan told USA TODAY. "You bring that baggage into your next relationship, or that baggage gets expressed in reactive ways."
Even years later, people may try to 'make sense' of breakups
Matt Grammer, a licensed professional clinical counselor-supervisor and founder of Therapy Trainings, says he's seen people, even years after a breakup, speak about the details of their relationship "as if they are still trying to make sense of it."
"A relationship can end, but that doesn’t mean one or both people have worked through their emotions about it," Grammer said.
Doriel Jacov, a psychotherapist and founder of DJ Psychotherapy, agrees that time passing also doesn’t necessarily mean that a breakup has been emotionally processed.
"Someone can think little about an ex for years until those feelings are reactivated by a reminder, a specific question, hearing an ex discuss the relationship, a new relationship or revisiting the story of what happened," Jacov said. "What arises can be a signal that there are certain aspects of what happened in a relationship that are yet to be fully processed."
With Rodgers' situation specifically, Chan adds he seems to be creating a narrative where he’s the victim and she’s the villain.
"While I don’t know what happened between them, we never will, the reaction of how he’s blasting her is very telling," Chan says. "He has every right to his version of what happened. But there's a difference between sharing your side and needing an audience to declare you the winner of the breakup."
And by the time all the narratives get shared on social media, does it even matter who "won?"
Contributing: KiMi Robinson
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Aaron Rodgers, Shailene Woodley and lasting relationship breakup bitterness
