John Mellencamp reminisced about the good old days with his ex-fiancée, Meg Ryan, but admitted he was a “shitty boyfriend” while the two were together.
“Meg Ryan had just come out of her shell; I had just come out of my shell,” the singer said in an interview with Esquire, published on Tuesday.
“We started dating. And we decided to do things on our own instead of having people do stuff for us,” Mellencamp explained, adding that the two “were so fucking lost.”
“We didn’t know how to do anything. I’ve never checked out of a hotel by myself,” he said.
Mellencamp and Ryan were first publicly linked together in 2011, and remained on and off for years. The two got engaged in 2018, though they broke it off a year later, according to People magazine.
The early days of their relationship came with a major learning curve for both of them, according to Mellencamp.
“Her and I went to a grocery store, and they wanted our credit card, and we looked at each other and said, ‘Here it is,’ and they said, ‘No, you’ve got to put it in this thing,’ and we went, ‘Then what happens?’” he told Esquire this week.
“We laughed at how stupid we are, so hard we cried,” he said. “I think she’s learned how to do everything, and I’ve learned how to do nothing.”
The artist told the magazine that he still “loves” Ryan, whom he says he was with for a decade.
“She doesn’t love me so much. She’s a great girl,” he said. “I’m just a shitty boyfriend.”
Mellencamp made similar comments about his behavior during an interview on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show in 2017.
“Oh, women hate me. I loved Meg Ryan. She hates me to death,” he said. “I think it’s because I’m a child. I throw fits, I gripe, I complain. I’m moody. Every bad thing that a fella can be, that’s me.”