Jessica Simpson And Drew Barrymore Dish About Marriage, Divorce & Dating

Jessica Simpson and Drew Barrymore are getting candid on Thursday’s episode of “The Drew Barrymore Show”, bonding over marriage, divorce, and dating.

“When I got divorced it was such a tragedy for me personally that I really flailed as a human being,” Barrymore, 46, tells Simpson. The host is thrice-married and thrice-divorced; her most recent marriage to Will Kopelman ended in 2016.

It’s a feeling that Simpson, 40, knows all too well after her much-publicized courtship, marriage, and divorce from Nick Lachey in 2006. She later tied the knot with Eric Johnson in 2014.

She recalls: “Failure in general, I feel like, as creative people and artists, were such perfectionists and even growing up in the church and as a preacher’s daughter I had a standard of what marriage was supposed to be and, oh wow, it really wasn’t that within the first week. It was like Whoa, okay so it’s not like that fairy tale. But I got married really young.”

Simpson and Lachey invited cameras into their lives with “Newlyweds: Nick And Jessica” at a time when reality TV was new to the MTV crowd.

“There was ‘The Osbournes’ and then ‘The Real World’ and Nick and I. Yeah, so for our marriage it was definitely stressful,” she says of the series, which ran from 2003 to 2005, the same year the couple filed for divorce. “We did have fun. I mean, up until the end of the last season did it get to be just overwhelming because we were at a place where our communication was no longer communication anymore, it was very one-sided on each side.”

Before she married Johnson, the singer spent some time dating, teasing a few relationships that went “under the radar.”

“I have dated a couple of musicians, some under the radar that people don’t know about, we’ve got to keep some secrets,” she teases.

Barrymore agrees, adding, it’s “so much fun when you can get away with it” but it’s still “really embarrassing about when you go on like one date with a guy and then all of a sudden you are inextricably linked and everybody thinks that you’ve had this whole thing and you are just like, ‘I don’t even know them, I thought about it but now I’m like, ‘Ahhh, linked to you.’”

But Simpson also reveals men she was seeing would be told that being seen with her would poison their public image.

“I felt like any time it started to get a little bit serious I was the person to run from because every guy would be listening to their publicist who would be like, ‘Stay away, stay away you’ll never be a respected actor, you’ll never be a respected musician if you are dating her,’ but that was back then, that was the excuses I heard,” Simpson adds.

“The Drew Barrymore Show” airs weekdays at 3 p.m. ET/PT on Global.