John Mayer gets candid on sobriety changing his love life

Singer-songwriter John Mayer has famously been in several relationships with A-list celebrities, like Katy Perry, Jennifer Aniston, and Taylor Swift, but now he’s opening up about the current state of his dating life, and it turns out his choice to be teetotal has affected it.

Speaking with the Call Her Daddy podcast, he told host Alexandra Cooper that his sobriety has affected his love life such that he doesn’t have the chutzpah to even date anymore.

“Dating is no longer a codified activity for me, it doesn’t exist in any kind of… it’s not patterned anymore,” he said in the most recent episode. “I don’t really date, I don’t think that I have to, to be quite honest.”

He explained his thinking further, adding, “I quit drinking like six years ago, so I don’t have the liquid courage, I just have dry courage.”

“You have to be honest,” he concluded. “You have to express yourself. You have to be glaringly honest… You have to express your anxieties, you can’t just walk over them by drinking.”

This isn’t the first time the “Your Body Is A Wonderland” singer has opened up about his journey to sobriety. In a 2018 cover story for Complex, he revealed that he stopped drinking in 2016, with Drake's 30th birthday celebration being the last occasion booze touched his lips. 

Calling his terrible hangovers his main motivation to go teetotal, he said, "So what happens when you stop drinking? The level feels like boredom at first. But if you stick with it, the line straightens out, and it goes kind of low. You're like, 'Oh, I'm not having these high highs.' But if you work, you can bring the whole line up."

And he’s even mentioned before how his desirability among women has decreased. In 2018, the Grammy winner revealed, “I find people not being into me brings a real level of reality into my life. Not so long ago, I gave a girl my number, and she said, 'I probably won't use it.'"

That’s a far cry from what he was saying just a year before. In 2017, he told The New York Times, "I'm a young guy. I like girls. I want girls to like me. I want to make music and be thought of as attractive." Talk about changing your tune. 

Back in 2013, Mayer's ex-girlfriend Katy Perry called him a “broken bird” in an interview with Vogue, saying, “All I can say about that relationship is that he's got a beautiful mind. Beautiful mind, tortured soul. I do have to figure out why I am attracted to these broken birds."

After her relationship with Mayer ended, Friends star Jennifer Aniston said, “We care about each other. It's funny when you hit a place in a relationship and you both realize, we maybe need to do something else, but you still really, really love each other. It's painful.”

Other famous exes like Taylor Swift and Jessica Simpson have publicly expressed their disappointment with how John handled their relationships and breakups. With Swifties continually coming out fighting in the comments section, Mayer also addressed his bad reputation with host Cooper, saying, “I think, look, the elephant in the room is that I’m on a show that caters to women, and I have a couple of nameplates on me, like ‘Lothario’ and ‘womanizer,’ and I think that is what that is.”

“But I think people would be surprised to know that it was less me going like, you know, the meme of the guy behind the tree?” he added. “It was less this [Mayer rubs his hands together] and more like this [Mayer looks around]: Me? Because it was always set forth to me that like, that shouldn’t happen.”

He then admitted that in his youth, he got it into his head that if someone fancied him, it was a happy “accident” that he should “capitalize” on.

Listen to Mayer and Cooper’s full conversation here.