Emeli Sande’s successful career destroyed her marriage

The ‘My Kind of Love’ hitmaker divorced her childhood sweetheart Adam Gouraguine in 2013 - just one year after getting married - at the peak of her fame and now, on reflection, she thinks her impressive achievements ruined her relationship. Asked by The Sun newspaper if she regretted getting hitched during the peak of her fame, she said: “Yeah, I would have loved to have had more time together. “He had his dreams and I had mine, and I feel like he was so supportive of mine. It was very fast. “But there is nothing I regret about doing my music because it was something I have always wanted to do since I was a kid and I had no idea there was going to be that explosion.” The 29-year-old singer believes she had no choice but to call off the marriage because she felt she was losing sight of herself. She explained: “I had to be like, ‘I need to figure out who I really am and I can’t expect you to wait around for it - that’s very unfair’. I didn’t want to be in a relationship until I was really certain of who I am, and I needed to be alone to do that.” After she and Adam went their separate ways, Emeli suffered a breakdown as she was struggling to deal with life on her own. However, she believes penning her forthcoming album ‘Long Live the Angels’ - and, in particular, her new single ‘Breathing Underwater’ - has really helped her overcome her demons. She said: “I treated it as a diary, it was like my own kind of therapy really for myself. With ‘Breathing Underwater’ I was at a point in my life where the worst had happened, I was over that. “That was me putting the bricks back together and really starting to find my stride in life. The things I thought were impossible like being alone, being independent, knowing myself, all of these things. Suddenly I was facing places that I never thought I could for me. I survived the one thing I feared the most and I really faced myself. It was the first time I had ever been alone, really. I really felt free. I could do anything I want. I put myself in my own box and then I suddenly broke free.”