Mikayla Nogueira has finally explained, in detail, why her marriage to Cody Hawken ended. The beauty creator laid out the reasons on Monday's episode of Jay Shetty's On Purpose podcast, her first extended account of the split since the Mikayla Nogueira divorce became public, USA Today reported.

Until now, coverage of the Mikayla Nogueira divorce has relied on her short public statements. Nogueira pointed to two forces that broke the marriage apart: her fast rise to viral fame, and Hawken's long struggle with addiction. She commands an audience of more than 17 million followers on TikTok, and she told Shetty the pressure of that spotlight changed everything about their life together.

The couple married in July 2023 after a widely covered wedding attended by fellow creators. Nogueira announced their separation in February, asking fans at the time to keep Hawken's addiction history out of the conversation. She had kept followers posted through TikTok videos, but the podcast appearance was the first time she connected the dots in her own words. The Mikayla Nogueira divorce was finalized in July.

A relationship that started during big changes

Nogueira said she and Hawken met just as her social media career was taking off. Hawken had recently moved to Massachusetts and was in rehab for substance abuse when they got together. Both are 28, and Nogueira described them as two people going through enormous life changes at the same time, a detail that has shaped much of the public discussion of the Mikayla Nogueira divorce.

At first, she said, Hawken supported her growing fame. She told Shetty that neither of them understood the scale of what was coming. According to her account, he found the attention much harder to live with than he had expected, and the widening gap between their trajectories sat at the center of the Mikayla Nogueira divorce.

Fame made the pressure worse

As her audience grew, so did the hate she received online, and Nogueira said she coped by going numb. She described becoming very detached from her own life while Hawken relapsed more than once. He later told her he had been drinking regularly after the wedding and hiding it from her, another fact that only came out during her breakdown of the Mikayla Nogueira divorce.

She also recounted the night she called the scariest of her life: she woke to find Hawken unconscious late at night and called police and an ambulance to their home. The episode left her shaken and, she said, made the distance between them harder to close.

The strain that ended in the Mikayla Nogueira divorce is familiar territory for creators whose relationships play out in public. Recent coverage of a streamer whose relationship unraveled live on air showed how quickly an audience can become part of the story. And the business side carries its own pressure: disputes like AJ Gentile's complaint against Night Media show how much money and leverage sit behind the content people watch for fun.

Why they finally called it quits

Long before the Mikayla Nogueira divorce was finalized, Nogueira said she wanted to help Hawken, but she came to believe that getting sober was a decision only he could make. Her schedule was demanding and exhausting, she explained, and she felt he needed a partner who could simply be around more than she could be.

The couple had considered ending the marriage once before, on Christmas Day 2024, according to her account. Hawken got sober after that, and they tried to rebuild. It did not hold. Nogueira said he seemed like a completely different person in the final year of the marriage, and one last explosive fight brought the Mikayla Nogueira divorce to its conclusion.

Reaction to the interview has kept the Mikayla Nogueira divorce in the conversation all week, with fans and fellow creators weighing in on what her honesty says about fame and relationships. Nogueira herself was careful to say the relationship was not all bad. She told Shetty they shared beautiful years alongside difficult ones, and that she and Hawken are both looking forward to time apart to figure out who they are. People reported that the divorce was finalized in July, closing a chapter that began when two people met at a moment when both their lives were changing fast.