Another One Chicago relationship bites the dust. Ever since news broke of their split in August 2023, fans have wondered the real reason behind Sophia Bush and her ex- husband Grant Hughe’ divorce. Now, almost a year later, Bush is revealing all.
Bush, who played Detective Erin Lindsay on Chicago P.D. from Seasons 1 to 4, and Hughes, an entrepreneur, started dating n May 2020. They announced their engagement in August 2021 and married on June 11, 2022, at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “From the moment we got engaged, I knew what I wanted my dress to be,” Bush told Vogue at the time. “I’d seen a photograph of a @moniquelhuillier dress taken on Lake Como, and I had a vision of creating a personalized version of it, in what I have always thought of as a ‘heritage print’: a print of flowers from California, Oklahoma, and Italy, to honor the heritage of our families—where we come from and how we are all coming together to map where we are going.”
Hughes is Bush’s second husband. She was married to her first husband and her One Tree Hill co-star, Chad Michael Murray, from 2005 to 2006. Bush also dated her Chicago P.D. co-star, Jesse Lee Soffer, who played Detective Jay Halstead from Seasons 1 to 10, from 2014 to 2015.
Bush and Hughes celebrated their one-year anniversary in June 2023. “Today marks 365 days of calling you ‘husband,’” Bush wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post at the time. “Best decision of my life. It still feels just like this. Ecstatic. Running toward the future, grinning and laughing, together. I love you, my favorite. Happy Anniversary.”
After 13 months of marriage, Bush filed for divorce from Hughes on August 4, 2023. So why did Sophia Bush and Grant Hughes divorce? Read on for the real reason for their breakup.
Why did Sophia Bush and Grant Hughes divorce?
Why did Sophia Bush and Grant Hughes divorce? In an essay for Glamour in April 2024, Bush she almost broke up with Hughes before their wedding in 2022. “In April of 2022 I was close to calling off my wedding,” she wrote. “Instead of running away, I doubled down on being a model wife. In 2023 my now ex-husband posted a lovely tribute to our first anniversary on Instagram. When I saw it, I felt the blood drain from my face. Fans and friends were telling me how exciting this milestone was and how happy I looked. I felt nothing.”
She continued, “Things hadn’t been easy at home, but everyone says marriage is hard, right? As the day wore on, I felt mounting pressure from strangers online waiting for me to post something—what a strange part of public life to have to navigate—so I sat myself down and chose a picture.”
Bush explained that she and Hughes divorced due to the simple feeling that their marriage wasn’t right. “I believe in people and ideas so deeply—and those feelings are often so powerful to me—that I hadn’t realized I’d spent the last two decades moving through life showing up for others but often turning my back on myself,” she wrote. “This time things felt different. Maybe it’s just cold feet, I told myself. Maybe I was too sensitive. Maybe this was the feeling you get when you settle down later in life and have to make space for another person. There have been moments in my life when it feels like the universe is screaming at me to pay attention. This was one of them, but I didn’t listen.”
Bush filed for divorce from Hughes on August 4, 2023 after 13 months of marriage, according to legal documents obtained by People. “Sophia and Grant were friends for 10 years and bonded during COVID through their love of community service,” a source told the magazine at the time. “They continue to run their nonprofit together and remain good friends.” Bush and Hughes are both founders of the Bush Hughes Foundation For Progress, which was created in 2022.
Bush also removed her married name, “Hughes,” from her Instagram bio. News of Bush and Hughes’ divorce also came a day after Bush posted a cryptic quote on her Instagram Story on August 3, 2023. “Sometimes you have to remind yourself that you’re something special,” the quote read. “That you can’t be replaced. Your heart, your mind, your conversation, your care, it can’t be replaced. By anyone.”
She also shared another cryptic quote on the day she filed for divorce. “Nothing is every too early or too late. What is divinely meant for you cannot be rushed, delayed or taken away.”
Following their divorce, Bush went on to date former United States soccer player Ashlyn Harris, whom she first met in 2019. Bush explained that she and Harris — who was also in the process of divorcing her own wife, Ali Krieger — started to fall for each other while leaning on each other as friends amid their divorces. “I didn’t expect to find love in this support system. I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it,” she wrote. “And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option. What I saw was a friend with her big, happy life. And now I know she thought the same thing about me.”
Later in the essay, Bush responded to claims that she and Harris started dating while they were still married to their spouses. “The idea that I left my marriage based on some hysterical rendezvous—that, to be crystal-clear, never happened—rather than having taken over a year to do the most soul crushing work of my life?” she wrote. “Rather than realizing I had to be the most vulnerable I’ve ever been, on a public stage, despite being terrified to my core? It feels brutal. Just because I didn’t want to process my realizations in real time on social media and spell them out for the world doesn’t mean the journey wasn’t long and thoughtful and exhaustive.”
She continued, “It’s painful to be doing deep work and have it picked apart by clueless strangers. Everyone that matters to me knows what’s true and what isn’t. But even still there’s a part of me that’s a ferocious defender, who wants to correct the record piece by piece. But my better self, with her earned patience, has to sit back and ask, What’s the fucking point? For who? For internet trolls? No, thank you. I’ll spend my precious time doing things I love instead.”
For more One Chicago relationships, check out our gallery below on who the Chicago P.D. cast is dating and married to in real life.
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