Brooks Laich, 36, revealed he’s prioritizing exploring his sexuality in 2020, thanks to the encouragement from his wife Julianne Hough, 31. The former hockey player, who has been married to the actress for two years, opened up about the “beautiful new side of life” in an upcoming episode of his iHeartRadio podcast, How Men Think. “Nothing dirty can exist between two people in love,” he said in the episode. “A big part of my journey in 2020 is exploring my sexuality. And by that I don’t mean if I’m gay or straight. I mean, in my sexual relationship, what is my sexuality and what am I craving, and what are my desires and what are my wife’s?” He added, “How can we have this language to feed each other and get everything we want and be sexually expressed to the nth degree in everything.”
Crediting his Dancing With The Stars alum wife for motivating him to explore this other side of himself, Brooks went on to explain that as an athlete, “learning and figuring out my capacity for sexual feelings” hadn’t always been something he thought a lot about. “I woke up as an athlete, wanted to train, wanted to eat, sleep, rest, perform. Sexuality was way below all of that for the majority of my life,” he said. However the Canada native, who co-hosts the show with singer Gavin DeGraw, said threesomes were off the table for him. “I don’t know if I could ever get that. I can’t ever see myself being physical with somebody else. In this stage of life, I’m looking for a deeper connection and romance.”
Throughout the conversation, he also reflected on how much he appreciates marriage, and that he vividly remembers how “alone” he felt when he was single. “When I think of being married and being in my relationship, truthfully at my core, I don’t see any other life for me. Like that’s the life that I choose,” he said, adding, “I choose that every second of every day. So could I fantasize about it [being single]? Maybe. But that’s all it would be. Truthfully, genuinely to my heart, do I actually want that? No.”
On Jan. 8 it was reported that the former America’s Got Talent judge and her hunky hubby were having marriage issues two and a half years after tying the knot in a romantic 2017 ceremony in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “They have been spending time apart but are not ready to share what’s going on between them,” an insider told E! News. “They don’t even really know what to call it. There’s a ton of love and emotion there and they are going through something very personal.”