Sam Asghari has responded to his ex-wife Britney Spears’s rare comments about their marriage.
Spears, 43, told her followers in an August 24 Instagram post that her “secret to survival” was “denial and a lot of tears,” while stating that her marriage to actor and personal trainer Asghari felt like a “fake distraction” to help her deal with the pain of being away from her children.
“We’re just people so fragile and human,” she wrote in the since-edited post, calling her marriage to Asghari “the hardest years of my life.”
Now, Asghari has issued a statement to People through his representative, saying: “Our marriage was very real to me. It may have been short, but we were together for seven years.”
“I was in love with her, will always have love for her, and wish her the best always,” he added.
Spears and Asghari — who recently competed on the hit show The Traitors — met in 2016 on the set of her music video for “Slumber Party.” They became Instagram official in 2017 and dated until they got engaged in September 2021. The following April, Spears announced she was pregnant with their first child together; however, the next month, she shared that she had suffered a miscarriage.
They married in 2022 but Asghari filed for divorce in August 2023 after just 14 months. Their split — Spears’ third divorce — was finalized in 2024.
When they met, Spears was still under conservatorship, which was terminated in 2021.
The “Toxic” singer was estranged from her sons Sean Preston, 19, and Jayden James, 18 — whom she shares with ex-husband Kevin Federline — until after her conservatorship case, which lasted until November 2021. She claimed in her post that she was “cut off from calling or texting” her sons during her marriage to Asghari.
However, Spears appears to have since repaired her relationship with her sons, and has been sharing videos and photos of them to social media regularly over the past year.
In April, she posted a video of one of her sons playing the piano, captioning it: “Mamas don’t get enough credit at all these days !!! I mean just saying !!!”
She added: “I made a person !!! A live breathing person and I made two of them !!! And my boys are so incredibly sweet and charming !!! I’m so blessed.”