Emeli Sande at the MTV EMAs
The 27-year-old singer has said she was dangerously close to suffering a "breakdown" after her break up from Adam Gouraguine - who she was with for 10 years - in 2013 and admitted she is still trying to deal with losing her "best friend".
She told The Times newspaper: "Everyone thought I'd gone mad. 'What do you mean a divorce? We were all at your wedding a few months ago!' But there was just something inside me that said, 'This isn't the life. You're pretending to be someone else.'
"And that's so hard to explain to someone. I can't even explain it now.
"I just felt I had to wake up. I'd been sleeping and things were happening. I could get up on stage and sing but, I don't know, it was just a real ... I don't want to call it a breakdown, but it felt like that.
"Every day you get a bit stronger. Every day you stop blaming yourself for things.
"I think I spent the couple of months after not in denial, but not really dealing with what had happened.
"Adam and I had been together since I was 17. He was my only boyfriend. That's the only person I've been with for the past 10 years.
"So [losing] our relationship more than the marriage was the big part for me to deal with.
"Having a friend who'd been my best friend for so long ... losing that support and structure in my life was the biggest thing."
Apparently her regret stems from living such separate lives while they were together. She says that she has no negative things to say about her childhood sweetheart and is going to keep her tattoo which reads, 'I love you Adam.'
She is now single for the firt time since she was just 17 yers old; "I was on tour all the time and I think it was quite unfair of me to want his world to fit into my life so much.
"He'd come on tour then he'd go away for three months on a marine biology expedition somewhere.
"When we caught up it was great and we could tell each other stories, but it was almost like we were living our lives away from each other and growing into different people.
"And as soon as I got some rest and the madness stopped and I had a bit of a holiday, I was like, 'OK, let's see, what's been going on.' There were just lots of things. And stuff that just wasn't ... we were mates, but maybe we shouldn't have been married.
"I just didn't know who I was. And I felt I was being taken further and further away from who I really was and from my family.
"He was the person that had been there from the very beginning. And maybe I was just looking for."
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