Jessica Simpson: John Mayer made me feel sexually powerful & intellectually insecure
As we discussed, Jessica Simpson has written a memoir called Open Book. She details suffering through childhood sexual abuse and how she struggled with addiction to alcohol and prescription pills. She had a come-to-Jesus moment on Halloween in 2017 and she’s been sober ever since. People Mag and Page Six had additional excerpts from her book, and it looks like she discussed her relationship with John Mayer in detail. They met in early 2005 and dated for about two years. Mayer was her first big romance following her divorce from Nick Lachey and Mayer sounds like he was a complete douchebag to her. Some highlights:
He began writing to her soon after they met: The notes quickly became more intimate, and after she divorced Nick Lachey in late 2005, she began dating other men. But as she writes, Mayer told her “he wanted to have all of me or nothing…He’d walk into a room and pick up his guitar and you’d swoon.I didn’t really know the man behind the guitar. And that was my mission.” They dated in secret for several months and she fell in love with his intensity. “Again and again, he told me he was obsessed with me, sexually and emotionally,” she writes. “He loved me in the way that he could and I loved that love for a very long time. Too long. And I went back and forth with it for a long time. But it did control me.”
The relationship was very physical & sexual: “The connection was so strong that he made me feel seductive, and he spoke about sex and my body in a way that made me feel powerful, at least physically. Where I felt insecure in the beginning was that I always felt I was falling short of the potential he was in me. I constantly worried that I wasn’t smart enough for him.”
She had anxiety about not being smart enough for him: “He was so clever and treated conversation like a friendly competition that he had to win. When I tried to leap back in and say something to add to the dialogue he was having with himself, he would challenge what I said and I’d get quiet. I was so afraid of disappointing him that I couldn’t even text him without having someone check my grammar and spelling.” The pressure pushed Simpson to reach for the bottle. “My anxiety would spike, and I would pour another drink. It was the start of me relying on alcohol to mask my nerves.”
She stopped talking to him after he called her “sexual napalm” in a 2010 Playboy interview. “He thought that was what I wanted to be called. I was floored and embarrassed that my grandmother was actually gonna read that. A woman and how they are in bed is not something that is ever talked about. It was shocking.” The hardest part was learning Mayer had broken her trust. “He was the most loyal person on the planet and when I read that he wasn’t, that was it for me. I erased his number. He made it easy for me to walk away.”
Ah, the infamous “sexual napalm” Playboy interview. I remember covering that in pieces because Mayer said so much about all of his exes. Mayer was – and probably still is – a total tea-spilling gossip. He was trying to compliment Jessica though – he was trying to praise her as, like, the sexiest woman he had ever been with. It was funny because he and Jennifer Aniston had just recently broken up and he basically said that Jen lived in the ‘90s and didn’t understand modern celebrity.
As for what Jessica says… it sounds like Mayer was the first guy she had ever been “in lust” with and it threw her for a loop. And it sounds like they were both trying to make their intense physical attraction into “love” or something bigger and more profound. She didn’t realize that Mayer is just a f-ckboi and any time he tried to speak, she could have reached for a ball gag.
Photos courtesy of Getty, Avalon Red and Backgrid.
