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Lana Del Rey has been stirring up controversy for years now. Some of it has made her more endearing to fans while other choices have left them scratching their heads. One of her decisions that had been something of a puzzling one was within her love life.

While Del Rey had previously gotten headlines for talking candidly about her opportunistic approach to dating within the music industry, her relationship with a police officer had turned even more heads. 

Del Rey and Sean “Sticks” Larkin seemed like a rather odd pairing to many fans, and now it seems like the short-lived relationship has already come to an end. 

Sean “Sticks” Larkin is a celebrity TV star

Lana Del Rey
Lana Del Rey | David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

While a megastar dating a police officer doesn’t seem all that likely, Larkin is not just any police officer. He’s a reality TV star who works with A&E on two different cop shows: Live PD and PD Cam. He also portrays himself as a CrossFit enthusiast and has several sweaty Instagram selfies to back it up. 

While the name “Sticks” — a seeming reference to police batons that have been at the center of several brutality charges across the country — is rather ominous, Larkin insists that the nickname doesn’t come from an association with violence.

When he took off after a suspect without a gun or any other kind of weapon, his captain started calling him “F**k-Stick,” which was eventually shortened to “Stick” and then transformed into “Sticks.” He insists no one in his personal life uses the moniker. 

Lana Del Rey and Sean Larkin were spotted together about six months ago 

The exact date the pair began dating isn’t known to the public, but they were spotted together around September of 2019. By the end of the year, they had made their relationship official on social media. By the time they walked down the red carpet together at the 2020 Grammys, it was clear that the pair were in a rather serious relationship. 

Some people raised eyebrows at their age difference — Larkin is 46 and the father of a 22-year-old while Del Rey is 34. However, that’s not really that big of an age gap in the celebrity dating world. Mostly, fans just didn’t really have time to process the relationship in any substantial way. It wasn’t until that red carpet appearance in January that many people even knew the two were an item.

A Harper’s Bazaar profile titled “Who is Sean ‘Sticks’ Larkin, Lana Del Rey’s New Boyfriend?” was published on March 19, 2020. That’s the very same day that E! News reported the pair had split. It’s telling that he was portrayed publicly as both her “new” boyfriend and her “ex” boyfriend on the same day. The pair simply weren’t together very long. 

Fans are responding to the break up with humor 

Just like we aren’t sure when, exactly, the relationship began, we don’t have a clear sense of when it came to an official end. In a profile for the New York Times (also published on March 19), Larkin revealed that they were no longer together. “Right now, we’re just friends. We still talk and whatnot, we just have busy schedules right now,” Larkin explained. 

Larkin didn’t make it sound like the relationship ending was a particularly fresh change, so it’s possible that the pair have been split up for a while now. Fans took this opportunity to humorously voice their hope that Del Rey’s emotional response to the breakup would mean that some excellent music from the singer was on the way.

One wrote that they were expecting the “album of the century” as a response. 

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