Lauren Alaina spills about her broken engagement to longtime love Alex Hopkins in a new podcast interview.

Alaina had dated Hopkins for six years when she announced their engagement in a joyful post to social media in July of 2018, writing, “Being yours forever has a nice ‘RING’ to it.” But she tells Ashley Eicher and Hunter Kelly of the All Our Favorite People podcast that differences began to become more apparent within months of the happy news.

“We started dating at 17, and we’re now 24 years old,” she states. “We’re very different people, and we have different goals, and we want to go different places in life. When we got engaged, it got really real. Not that it wasn’t real before, but it was just like, ‘Oh.’ When you start planning your entire future and you’re not agreeing on things, it’s very hard. But he was all I knew, and I was all he knew.”

At the same time that the couple were experiencing growing doubts, Alaina was dealing with a family medical crisis as her stepfather, Sam Ramker, was battling stage 4 melanoma. He and her mother moved from their home in Wisconsin into Alaina's home in Nashville so Ramker could undergo treatment at Vanderbilt Medical Center, and after his death on Oct. 21, Alaina says all of her problems came to a head.

She sought treatment via a residential therapy program just outside of Music City, where she underwent a week of intensive sessions that she found life-changing. Though she entered the program to deal with her current problems, Alaina says she ended up dealing with childhood traumas as well, including her grandfather's suicide.

Who Was Lauren Alaina's Fiance, Alex Hopkins?

Armed with new clarity, Alaina ended her engagement, and she and Hopkins announced their decision to part in posts to social media a week after she completed the therapy program, writing, “While we still have love for each other, we’ve grown into very different people over the last six years. We are now in a place where we are each looking forward to starting our own fresh, new chapters of our lives. We both love and respect each other and hope you will all do the same. This has not been an easy decision, but we both feel it is the right decision.”

“I’ll love him until the day that I die,” she says in the new interview. “I will never look back on our time together and think that it was a waste, ever ... He was such an important person in my life, but that just doesn’t make him the person that I’m supposed to be with forever.”

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