Nick Cannon Admitted He’s ‘Not Built’ For Marriage After His Divorce From Mariah Carey
Nick Cannon and Mariah Carey first married in 2011 and welcomed twins together, Moroccan and Monroe. The couple split in 2014 but continue to co-parent well together. In the years since then, Cannon has gone on to have several more children with different women. But despite being in relationships with the mothers of his children, Cannon hasn’t gotten married since he tied the knot with Carey — and he won’t be anytime soon.
Nick Cannon reflected on his divorce from Mariah Carey
Cannon and Carey first announced their split in 2014, with their divorce being finalized two years later. Time may have passed, but Cannon admitted in a May 2022 appearance on It’s Tricky with Raquel Harper.
“Divorce is a sense of, ‘You failed,’ and when you have that level of failure with everyone seeing it, it was a lot on me for a long time,” he said. “I didn’t really know how to process it. I had to go find myself. I had to go within.”
“I love my family and I love all of my children and every woman that’s given me the blessing to experience that, but marriage and all that goes into that, it’s a lot. I mean, everybody who’s married knows that it is,” he continued. “You’re literally entering a partnership that says, ‘We’re two [becoming] one.’ I’m not built for that. I’ve tried it, I’ve tried it, even without infidelity or any of those things. And I have to admit, clearly, I have issues with being selfish. I have issues with insecurity. I have issues where most people can’t admit, but I’ve struggled with my ego and all that stuff.”
“So to be able to open up after marriage and be like, ‘Now I got to work on myself. Now I got to work on being the best me,’ and still hitting hurdles and still coming up with challenges daily? I’m like, I don’t even want to put the toxic energy that I’m working through onto someone else,” he concluded. “You never want to be responsible for someone else’s happiness. So when I’m dealing with someone from this point on, it’s, ‘How can we work on you being the best individual you can be, me being the best individual I can be, and we coexist in this space?'”
Nick Cannon isn’t the marriage type
When speaking about if he’ll ever get married again, Cannon admitted that he doesn’t see it in the cards for him.
“It depends on what you call marriage. Getting the government involved? Nah. We can go have a ceremony somewhere,” he said. “Why would the government be involved in your love life? That seems so bizarre to me. It’s really a business and to bring business and love together, that’s a tough one to get involved with.”
He called his marriage to Carey “one of the greatest experiences of my life,” adding, “And for that to come to an end as well, why would I go back if I couldn’t make that work out right?”
“Once I gave my all to a scenario, going forward, I’d have to be presented with something I’ve never seen before in order to go back to something like that,” he affirmed. “I did my best in this space, and now I feel like there’s a new journey in my life. I’m not going to backtrack and put myself in that situation again because it doesn’t get better than that.”
Mariah Carey said she and Nick Cannon ‘could’ve worked it out’
Carey similarly looked back at her marriage — and its downfall — in her 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey.
“Honestly, I think Nick and I could have worked it out between the two of us, but egos and emotions got inflamed (which can translate into many billable lawyer hours, and ultimately it did),” Carey confessed. “It was tough. We both wanted to make sure everything was cool for our family. We will always be family, and we make it work.”
“He was a good guy. He was faith-based. He was ambitious,” she added. “He had been in the entertainment industry a long time, so he understood the madness. He paid attention to me.”
