LOS ANGELES — On Saturday night in Oakland, Ariana Grande opened her first tour in six and a half years to an arena that sang every word back at her. By Tuesday, the public learned that the relationship running underneath the most scrutinized chapter of her career had quietly ended. The two facts are doing a lot of work on each other.
Grande, 32, and Ethan Slater, 34, have split after nearly three years together, People first reported, describing the breakup as amicable. ABC News reported that representatives for both did not respond to requests for comment, and neither has said anything publicly.
The silence is part of why the story lands the way it does. This was never a private relationship in any meaningful sense. It began on the set of Wicked, the biggest movie-musical bet of the decade, survived two press tours under a microscope few couples have endured, and became inseparable from the public account of Grande’s Glinda years. Its ending now arrives with surgical timing, four days after the Eternal Sunshine tour launched and seven weeks before her album Petal lands on July 31.
The timeline tracks the movie almost beat for beat. The two met when cameras rolled on Wicked in December 2022, after Grande was cast as Glinda in the Jon M. Chu adaptation. They were first photographed together at Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar party in March 2023, went Instagram official in November 2024 with a behind-the-scenes photo from the Sydney premiere, and walked the 97th Academy Awards together in March 2025.
The early months were the rough ones. The relationship emerged in the summer of 2023 as Slater’s marriage was ending, and the scrutiny that followed was intense enough that Grande largely stopped discussing her personal life in interviews. She showed up anyway, sitting in the audience at Spamalot to support his Broadway run that October, and Slater returned the gesture at the Critics Choice Awards in early 2025, saying he felt “immensely proud” watching her play a role she had wanted for so long.
The professional machinery around Grande, meanwhile, is at full throttle. The Eternal Sunshine tour opened at Oakland Arena on June 6 with a twenty-two-song set, her first road show since 2019, and runs through North America before closing at London’s O2 on September 1. Variety’s review of the opener called the performance bravura, the kind of notice that sells the remaining dates on its own.
That machinery is also the lens the industry will read this news through. A breakup disclosed mid-hiatus would have been a story about her; a breakup surfacing between a triumphant tour launch and an album rollout is a story the apparatus can absorb. Whether the timing was managed or merely lucky is unknowable from the outside, and nobody involved is volunteering an answer.
Slater’s side of the ledger is quieter. The Tony-nominated SpongeBob SquarePants star played Boq across both Wicked films and returns to a Broadway-centered career with no publicly announced next project, according to ABC News. He spent the relationship as the less famous half of a pairing that made him, fairly or not, one of the most discussed supporting actors in Hollywood.
What nobody outside their circle knows is when the relationship actually ended, who made the call, or why the news surfaced this week of all weeks. People’s sourcing describes the split as amicable and the two as remaining supportive of each other, but the report is unattributed by name, and with both camps silent there is no on-record account at all.
Grande has been here before in public, and her catalog has turned the experience into some of the most commercially durable music of her generation. It is impossible to know what Petal holds, and the speculation about which tracks were written when will now run hot through July, which is, cynically or not, the kind of attention albums are launched on.
There is one detail the Oakland setlist supplied that no publicist could have scripted. The final song Grande performed on opening night, two days before the news broke, was “we can’t be friends (wait for your love).” The arena sang that one back at her too.
