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Why Sophia Bush no longer believes in 'The One' after divorce

The former "One Tree Hill" star shared her feelings about love and loss in an essay she penned for Cosmopolitan.
/ Source: TODAY

Sophia Bush says her beliefs about love have changed a lot since she married and divorced her former "One Tree Hill" co-star Chad Michael Murray in her 20s.

For starters, she no longer believes in The One.

The "Chicago P.D." star opened up about the relationship — though she never mentions Murray by name — in a candid essay she penned for February's Cosmopolitan.

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Sophia Bush penned an essay about love and relationships for Cosmopolitan's February issue.Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images

"In my 20s, when I was starting out my career as an actor, I wasn’t looking for a relationship, but one found me and became serious, even though I hadn’t planned to settle down until my 30s," revealed Bush. "But when the person you’re with asks you to marry him, you think: This must be happening because it’s supposed to."

The 34-year-old actress, who wed Murray in 2005 and split just five months later, avoided publicly speaking about the relationship for years because she didn't want it to "define" her.

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The actress said she was traumatized by the media attention given to her breakup with her former "One Tree Hill" co-star Chad Michael Murray. Stephen Shugerman / Getty Images

"The reality is that, yes, it was a massive event in my life," she wrote. "And the trauma of it was amplified by how public it became, which was incredibly foreign and bizarre to a girl who’d been just another college kid 24 months before her life blew up."

A year after the split, Bush had a fun romantic fling with a "guy friend" of hers.

"Ever heard the phrase 'It’s a reason, a season, or a lifetime'? Well, this particular relationship was just a season, but still, it was life shaping."

Bush wrote that she "came to appreciate that relationships often serve a specific purpose at a certain point in time."

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Some unions heal us; others teach us to trust our own intuition, wrote the actress.

"A few months with the right person," she wrote, "can be as great an experience as a decade-long union with someone else."

"When you take the pressure of The One off, you’ll open yourself up to endless possibilities. You’ll learn to have a truly deep, knowing relationship with yourself first," wrote Bush.

Then the rest, she wrote, "will fall into place."