'She was my rock.' While Missy Higgins was trying to break America, she fell in love with her tour manager.

When Missy Higgins was 21, her debut album The Sound of White skyrocketed on the charts, turning her into an overnight success. It was raw, confessional, and all too relatable.

Now 41, the Australian songwriter has spent two decades in the spotlight and in 2024 she became the youngest solo artist inducted into the ARIAs Hall of Fame.

The public's fascination for Higgins is not just isolated to her music; there's also been a storm of interest surrounding her personal life.

First, there was the relationship with her tour manager, which drove endless curiosity from the media, and then there was her marriage to playwright Dan Lee, with whom she welcomed two children, Samuel and Luna.

Higgins met Dan back in 2013, when she was in Broome for a friend's wedding. She ended up singing a duet with him of the Kiss song 'I Was Made For Lovin' You', and from there, a spark was born.

Just eight months into their romance, they were engaged. In January 2015, they welcomed Samuel, and by March 2016 the pair exchanged their wedding vows in a relaxed farm wedding in Victoria.

When picking the music for her wedding, Higgins chose 'Waiting For My Real Life To Begin' by Colin Hay, to walk down the aisle.

On that choice, Higgins said that it reflected how she felt about the transformative power and hope of marriage.

"I did feel like I was waiting for my real life to begin, in a way… I'm on the edge of starting the life that I've dreamed of - being in a relationship, having kids and having 'the family'," she told Zan Rowe's Take 5 in 2023.

Higgins welcomed a second child, Luna in 2018, but by 2022 the marriage had fallen apart. All those hopes she'd once had, those expectations of security and the tight-knit family unit were no longer there.

"The shame of a 'failed marriage', a 'broken family', all the things I swore I would never let happen, happened. I was so determined for this not to be my story," she said on Instagram.

"We tried many ways to keep the story alive, keep things together, keep on searching down new avenues of hope, or hope-covered denial as it may have been. But then life happens, doesn't it? And once again I'm on my knees and utterly humbled by my inability to control it."

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A post shared by Missy Higgins (@missyhigginsmusic)

"I'm still grieving. I realised this today as I was walking through the bush crying like a lunatic in the rain. Grieving the way I thought things would turn out. Grieving the never-ending story-book love story I will never have."

She went on to say that although there is a lot of pain, she is grateful that Lee and her still "love and respect each other" and came to the decision together.

"To all the shattered hearts out there inside the compounds of their homes grieving quietly and feeling like an anomaly, you're not alone. You're not broken, you're just human. We're all just making it up as we go."

Higgins said on Take 5 that she is still accepting the change and navigating her 'new normal'.

"I had this dream, and this story written out for myself about marriage and about how you stick it out, that fairy tale of being together and talking about the good old days," she said.

"Being in a culture that really celebrates longevity, I wanted to be one of those people. I wanted to be successful at this. The one that managed to do it. And it just didn't work out that way."

Higgins said she and her ex-husband are amicably co-parenting their two kids.

Speaking to Mamamia previously, the nine-time Aria winner, and now Hall of Famer, described having children as "a shift at the core of your being", something deeply humbling.

"I'm less interested in myself now and less interested in my own emotional angst, and I'm more interested in, well obviously them, but also the world around me," she said.

"I think that's one of the things that motherhood does; it makes you a bit less selfish, which is a good thing when you're used to being such a navel-gazer. And especially being part of the entertainment industry, which is very ego-driven, it's nice to have that bit of that ego, kind of, chipped away at. When you have kids, [ego is] unhealthy, I think."

While Higgins previously framed her marriage as 'failed', something she details in the extremely raw confessional writing of her new album The Second Act, in retrospect, it maybe isn't as dire as all that.

In fact, now she largely sees their amicable separation as something to be proud of.

Watch: Missy Higgins speaking on her sexuality and the pressure she faced. Post continues below.

Going through a divorce is not the only difficult thing Higgins has needed to navigate in the public eye.

At the height of her fame, Higgins said she was still trying to work out her sexuality for herself, and the constant questioning was destructive.

"Everyone was speculating about my sexuality, which was such a personal thing, and such a thing I was grappling with," she previously said on Anh's Brush with Fame.

"All the journalists were trying to get an answer out of me, they all wanted me to say I was gay and to come out loud and proud but I was still figuring it out myself, and I felt so much pressure to put myself in a box and to put a label on it from everybody else."

She said the rumours made her "shut down".

"Every time I did an interview, I was in shutdown mode, because they were probing every single angle, trying to get me to slip up. Trying to get me to say a pronoun, you know? So I'd be like, 'How do I describe what this song's about without saying 'she'?'

"Shutting down in that way meant I wasn't going to be able to express myself because that would make me way too vulnerable. The world had me at that point, and they were abusing it. They were abusing that right, and I wanted to take it back."

Elaborating on that experience with Zan Rowe, Higgins said she craved privacy.

During this period, Higgins was on tour in America – and it was at this point that she fell in love for the first time with a woman, who was actually her tour manager.

"Her and I we were kind of secret in those days because we weren't out to everybody. It was my first relationship with a woman so I was really unsure about like if this was for me, am I gay – what's happening here? We didn't even tell the band. It was this special kind of moment amongst many that we shared together," Higgins told Rowe on Take 5 in 2022.

"Neither of us had 'come out', we didn't know if it was anybody else's business and we kind of didn't want it to be anybody's business because it was this beautiful thing between us. She was really my rock through that time. It's not something that I'm hiding, it's not something I'm ashamed of. It's a part of who I am."

Higgins' iconic song 'Scar' is reminiscent of this chapter.

"I was trying to find out who I was without all of the facades that had been built up over the years," she said.

"I was trying to throw that away, scrape everything away, and figure out who I was underneath it all. If I'd never written 'Scar', if I'd never released anything. What would my sound be? What would be the sound of my soul?"

Feature Image: Instagram @missyhigginsmusic.

This article was published in October 2022, and has since been updated with new information.

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