Emily Ratajkowski has shared candid details about her personal life, revealing how sex played a role in helping her reinvent herself after her divorce.
In a new essay for The Cut, the model and actress revealed that intimacy with her ex-husband, Sebastian Bear-McClard, came to an end about six months after the birth of their son, Sylvester.
“Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex,” Ratajkowski wrote. “Less than a year later, we separated.”
Following the breakup, Ratajkowski said she was determined to embrace a completely different version of herself.
“I wanted to destroy the Madonna, the special girl I’d worked so hard to be before an eight-pound baby had torn my vagina in two, and replace her with the whore,” she wrote, while reflecting on her experiences navigating the dating world afterward.
“I wish I could say I’d started to date slowly … but the truth is just a week after my split, I found myself in Brooklyn, a shell-shocked and sleepless version of myself,” she added. “‘I just need a distraction,’ I’d said, tasking my friends, who had giddily gotten to work by texting every unattached and (relatively) unembarrassing man they knew.”
She went on to describe one potential romantic interest, explaining that a DJ became an easy option because of his proximity and lack of complications.
“[A] DJ was the closest man in the vicinity and the lowest stakes [because] he lived only two blocks away from the apartment I’d shared with my ex and our son, had been sober for nearly a decade and was a friend of a friend of a friend.”
Although she never ended up sleeping with him, Ratajkowski said the experience helped launch a period of personal freedom and exploration.
“The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsive dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman,” she wrote. “Sexual but scary, and she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis. She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous.”
Ratajkowski was married to Bear-McClard from 2018 until their split in 2022. Since then, she has adjusted to life as a single mother while exploring the dating scene.
“Being a New Yorker made being a single mom feel sexier [and] bohemian, or at least that’s what I told myself,” she wrote, also revealing that she had never experienced a one-night stand before this chapter of her life.
Her latest essay echoes comments she made during a 2023 appearance on the Forbidden Fruits podcast, where she spoke about the role intimacy plays in her life.
“Sex is very relaxing to me. It’s, like, an outlet. It’s an expression, and I like to have it in my life,” she said. “You learn so much about people by having sex with them, it’s crazy. I’ve learned that from dating.”
