Three weeks before Matthijs de Ligt and Annekee Molenaar were due to marry in Italy, they called it off. More than a year later, Molenaar has described that stretch in one word, said twice: “Hel. Hel.” Hell. Hell.
Molenaar sat down with Robbert Rodenburg for the first episode of his new YouTube interview series Guncle, which aired in mid-September. It was her first public comment on the breakup after more than a year of silence.
She and De Ligt had been together for eight years, having met as teenagers, and were legally married in June 2024 in a small ceremony in Broek in Waterland in the Netherlands. The bigger Italian celebration was planned for the following summer.
“We met when we were seventeen, eighteen,” Molenaar told Rodenburg of the start of the relationship.
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“It was one big rollercoaster.”
‘Everyone was invited, and everyone had to be told’
Molenaar said the Italian wedding was called off with guests already booked.
“It was hell. Everyone was invited, so everyone found out shortly before: it’s not happening,” she told Rodenburg, as reported by andC.tv.
The reason, she said, was neither dramatic nor sudden. She rejected the theories that had circulated in Dutch tabloids and social media, including suggestions that her interest in spirituality had driven them apart.
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“I understand people think something must have happened between the two of us. But, I hate to break it, that just wasn’t the case,” she said.
She described a slower realization that had taken shape across the year between the civil ceremony and the planned Italian wedding.
“We came to the conclusion that romantically, it was no longer there,” she said.
Molenaar also said she had spent much of the relationship figuring out who she was in her own right. “I think it was only during our relationship that I found out what I actually like, what makes me happy.”
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A year of staying quiet
She did not go on the record while the speculation ran, and she did not read the coverage.
“I just relied purely on willpower. I didn’t read anything, and I didn’t respond anywhere,” she told Rodenburg, in quotes carried by Beaumonde.
She said she had no regrets, either about the way she handled the past year or about the marriage itself.
“I feel like people think: how can you get married and divorce a year later. But I don’t regret anything,” she said.
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Molenaar said there is still “a lot of love” between her and De Ligt.
De Ligt, meanwhile, has been working his own way back on the pitch. He had not played a competitive match since suffering a back injury in November 2025 that required surgery in May. He travelled with the Manchester United squad to Madrid for the Champions League tie at Atletico on 13 October, his first inclusion in a matchday squad in almost 11 months.
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