Kristen Stewart is only just recovering from her wildly famous relationship with Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson.
Not because she still pines for him, but because of the phenomenon it had snowballed into.
Stewart and Pattinson hit it off while filming the first installment of the Twilight saga. When fans found out that Bella and Edward were dating IRL, a sort of fantasy was created that Stewart found impossible to live up to.
“People wanted me and Rob to be together so badly that our relationship was made into a product,” Stewart told T magazine.
“It wasn’t real life anymore. And that was gross to me,” she continued.
“It’s not that I want to hide who I am or hide anything I’m doing in my life. It’s that I don’t want to become a part of a story for entertainment value.”
It got to the point where Stewart suffered anxiety on the regular, so much so that she told Elle Magazine recently that she got sick every morning.
That might have been why she ended up having an affair with her Snow White and the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders in the summer of 2012. He was married at the time to British model Liberty Ross, and Stewart was still very much with Pattinson.
Stewart, perhaps more famous for her reticent nature off-camera, wanted nothing to do with the level of fame she experienced.
“I’m not the typical showman. But at the same time, I want so badly to expose myself,” she said. “I want to be understood and I want to be seen, and I want to do that in the rawest, purest, most naked way I can.”
These days, Stewart has managed to survive the public backlash from that summer, though it did take a while for her to weather the storm.
Stewart is now in a relationship with producer Alicia Cargile, and she couldn’t be more proud to show off a relationship where she finally feels like herself.
“I would never talk about any of my relationships before, but once I started dating girls it seemed like there was an opportunity to represent something really positive,” Stewart said.
“I still want to protect my personal life, but I don’t want to seem like I’m protecting the idea, so that does sort of feel like I owe something to people.”