Matthew Perry has spoken out about his dating history and revealed why he’s broken up with all of the “wonderful women” that he’s dated.
The 53-year-old addressed his exes during a recent interview with GQ to discuss his newest memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which is focused on his issues with alcohol and substance abuse.
Speaking to the publication, Perry admitted that his own insecurities prevented him from staying in his past relationships. He also acknowledged that he’s broken up with his “wonderful” exes in order to avoid that fear of them breaking up with him.
“I break up with them because I’m deathly afraid that they will find out that I’m not enough, that I don’t matter, and that I’m too needy, and they’ll break up with me and that will annihilate me and I’ll have to take drugs and that will kill me,” he said. “That’s why I break up with these wonderful women that have crossed my path.”
The Friends star went on to share that he’d once considered tying the knot with some of his exes, who have now married other people and are building their lives with them.
“You know, I’m not being dramatic when I say there’s 10 women on the face of the planet that I would kill to be married to,” he said. “Who I’ve gone out with and broken up with. And now they’ve all moved on, all of them, and are married and have kids.”
He further confessed to reminiscing about his previous partners and detailed his mixed feelings about his dating history, adding: “They’re all happy, which is great, but I’m the one who’s sitting in a screening room by myself. And there’s no lonelier moment than that.”
Despite how many women he’s broken up with, Perry also clarified that there was an incident where a partner had dumped him and that he didn’t handle it properly.
“I lit candles in my house and drank and drank and drank over that, for about two years,” he said.
Although Perry didn’t specify all the women he’s dated, he did open up about his six month relationship with Julia Roberts, who he became close with before her guest appearance on season two of Friends. The pair broke up in April 1996.
To GQ, he recalled how he ended things with Roberts, explaining: “We were driving in a car and being chased by paparazzi, and I said, ‘I want to break up with you.’ Because I think she fancied herself slumming it with TV Boy. And then TV Boy just broke up with her. And you know that the reason I did that was purely out of fear. I needed to get out.”
Perry noted that while the Pretty Woman star doesn’t know that she’ll be discussed in his memoir, he thinks that she’ll be “flattered,” since he had “nothing but wonderful things about her”. He also emphasised that “sheer fear” was the only reason why he broke up with Roberts.
“I was like, ‘She’s going to dump me any minute, so I should probably dump her first,’” the Mr Sunshine star continued. “And that was fear-based and probably stupid. But that’s what I did.”
In his forthcoming memoir, Perry also recalled the early days of their romance, which had started over fax in 1995, before they met in person.
“I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived. Nine times out of 10, one had,” he wrote in an excerpt, published by The Times.
He went on to share how their relationship continued to grow when they exchanged numbers, as Perry said his first phone call with Roberts lasted for over five hours.
“After that we could not be stopped: five-hour conversations here, four-hour conversations there. We were falling; I wasn’t sure into what, but we were falling,” he wrote.
