Meg Ryan opens up about relationships past and present: 'Big turning point' she revealed

Meg Ryan opened up about a variety of topics in a rare, all-encompassing interview with The New York Times Magazine published on Friday, including her various relationships over the years.

The actress, who starred in some of the biggest romantic comedies of the '90s, has consciously shied away from the spotlight over the last 15 years or so in an effort to focus on "other things that life can give you" outside of Hollywood. Now engaged to musician John Mellencamp, Ryan is happy with where she is, firmly outside of the tabloids, focusing on her family and trying to get more into directing.

"Raising a kid takes a lot of time," Ryan, who adopted daughter, Daisy True, in 2006, explained of her life. "But I'm lucky because I can go places like a TED conference. I can go to Cambodia and travel around. I'm writing. I'm hoping to direct. I have a passion for design. I take pictures."

"What’s great about now is that John and I are so free to have fun," she said of her relationship with Mellancamp. "Maybe that freedom is about being a million years old. But I sometimes think relationships are for aliens. Who does it? Who can do it? I don’t know how any of us ever do."

Though she is content with where she is now, it took several epiphanies about Hollywood, celebrity gossip culture and her various romances through the years to get here.

"There’s an anecdote you told years ago, in passing, about being in London when your relationship with Russell Crowe was a big tabloid thing," interviewer David Marchese asked Ryan. "You mentioned walking into a hotel and having everyone stop and stare at you, then getting in an elevator and having this clarity about the emptiness of tabloid attention. Can you unpack that epiphany for me?"

"That was another big turning point in my evolution," she responded. "I’d never felt like I was all that concerned with what people thought of me, but then that story never got told right."

When asked to elaborate, Ryan explained that the dissolution of her decade-long marriage to Dennis Quaid and the cheating allegations that surrounded both of them, were misconstrued in the media -- especially her relationship with Crowe.

"The story of how I was divorced of what the actual problems were. It's a real gift when you know you can't ever really manage an image or a story and you stop caring," Ryan explained. "I felt the effect, like I was the bad guy or whatever the story was."

"But I remember letting go of needing to correct anybody. Divorce is hard. Love is hard. All those things were so personal," she went on. "They weren't for mass consumption. The complexity of a life or a marriage is never going to exist in a headline or a tabloid. That was a freeing thing to know!"

Read Meg Ryan's full interview with The New York Times Magazine here.