What Brian Austin Green’s divorce from Megan Fox teaches men about dating
His experience can teach every man something about friendship and attraction before jumping into the next relationship.
Brian Austin Green spent almost 15 years with Megan Fox, ten of them married. When that ended, he went back and rebuilt his approach to relationships from the ground up. According to AOL, Green, in an interview, got specific about what changed. For most of his dating life, he said, “First, I’d be physically attracted to somebody and then sort of build a relationship around that.” That pattern held through his marriage and after the divorce he didn’t expect, Green found himself a single dad, and said he went looking for what he’d actually been bringing into his relationships.
What Green said changed
Green, now 52, said therapy pushed him to flip the order entirely. With his fiancée, Dancing with the Stars pro Sharna Burgess, friendship came first. The two spent hours talking over breakfast before anything romantic started.
“We were really, really good, easy, natural friends to begin with,” he said. “Then we realized, in being physical, that we really worked well together, and then it became the relationship.”
He credited that sequence with taking the guesswork out of things early. “When you start from a place of a genuine connection with someone, then you’re not so concerned about whether they are truly into you or not,” Green said, since the honesty is already built in by that point.
He and Burgess also did something many couples skip. They laid out their flaws early instead of letting each other find out the hard way. “Sharna and I talked about our best qualities and our worst qualities together. We sort of put it all out on the table,” Green said.
Green’s takeaway on chemistry-first relationships was blunt. He said they run on borrowed time. “That’s only going to last for so long that you’re going to get to a point where you go, ‘I can’t stand that other person.’ So they’re not hot to me anymore,” he said.
Why this actually matters
Here’s the part worth sitting with if you’re a man who’s been through a breakup that didn’t make sense at the time. Green is describing a filter he built after his first marriage failed.
Most guys treat attraction as the entry test for a relationship. If the chemistry’s there, you figure the rest out as you go. Green’s own history argues against that. He had 15 years with Fox and real chemistry the whole time, and it still ended in a divorce he didn’t see coming, so that clearly wasn’t the missing piece. What he says he actually skipped was building an actual friendship before anything else, the kind where you already know how someone handles conflict, money, stress, and your worst days.
Attraction shuts down your judgment before it’s even had a chance to gather information. The moment you’re into someone, you start explaining away the things that would have been dealbreakers a week earlier. Green and Burgess avoided that by doing the evaluation first, as friends, when neither of them had anything on the line yet. By the time attraction entered the picture, they’d already stress-tested each other and knew the answer.
There’s a practical version of this you can actually use. Before you let a connection turn physical, ask yourself one question: if the attraction disappeared tomorrow, would you still want this person around as a friend? Green and Burgess could answer yes to that before they were ever a couple, because the friendship came first and was strong enough to stand on its own. If your honest answer is no, or you haven’t spent enough time with the person to know, that’s the signal to slow down, not speed up.
The other piece worth taking from this is the conversation Green says he and Burgess had early on, in which they laid out their strengths and flaws on purpose. Most men avoid that conversation, especially early, because it feels like handing someone a reason to leave. Green’s version did the opposite. Getting the rough edges on the table early meant neither of them was hiding a version of themselves for months, and that’s usually what erodes a relationship down the line.
Attraction still matters here. Green ended up with Burgess partly because the physical side worked too. The difference is what came first. If more than one relationship of yours has started fast and ended in a way that blindsided you, the fix is running the friendship test before you let attraction make the call, the same order Green says took him 15 years and a divorce to learn.
