Sarah Shahi Reveals She Lost Friends Over Surprise Steve Howey Divorce

Sarah Shahi revealed that not all of her friends stuck by her when she made the decision to divorce husband Steve Howey following over a decade of marriage.

“I lost friends from it. It was friends that were very deeply in the know that were like, ‘What are you doing?’” Shahi, 46, recalled on the Tuesday, February 24, episode of Amanda Hirsch’s “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast. “[Those were] people that had my back up until the moment that I did get the divorce.”

Shahi recalled getting “dropped” by some of her friends, adding, “I’m not a judgmental person. I’m always somebody where if someone’s going through something, I won’t give them my opinion but I’ll ask them a series of questions about how they feel so that way they come to their own conclusions.”

She continued: “But the amount of judgment I got from getting the divorce from people who honestly were just [as] unhappy in their own relationships. They decided to stick it out and they thought I should do the same. That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to have fun and be happy. Why can’t I do that? I have the right to be happy. Everybody has the right to be happy.”

Shahi and Howey, 48, met on the set of Reba, dating for several years before getting married in 2009. They were together for over a decade — and welcomed three kids — before Shahi filed for divorce in 2020.

“It worked out for both parties involved. There is no failure here,” Shahi exclusively shared in her January Us Weekly cover story. “I was in a relationship for 18 years and have three beautiful kids. It is by every definition a success to me and we have a beautiful relationship — Steve and I — now as coparents. It’s important to show the kids, in my opinion, that when something is out of sync, you have to have the courage to let it go.”

After working on Sex/Life in the midst of her divorce, Shahi found love with her costar Adam Demos. Following five years of dating, Shahi broke her silence to Us about their split, saying, “There was an element of the relationship that people really felt belonged to them, which was very sweet and heart- warming.”

She continued: “The flip to that is when things end, you feel like you’re going through it twice. You’re going through it emotionally on a personal level, and then you’re going through it again on a much bigger level.”

More recently, Shahi made a rare comment about what led to her split from Demos, 40.

“Without airing any kind of laundry, I do think … it’s hard to build a life when you have children unless the person truly, truly, truly wants that as well,” she said on Kristin Cavallari’s “Let’s Be Honest” podcast earlier this month. “This is not a comment on him but more about the ways that I show up as a parent. I show up as a parent in a very specific way. [As a child], we could walk into our mom’s bedroom at any time and we walked into the bathroom at any time. I think that can be a little challenging for somebody who may not be used to having kids.”

In the same podcast episode, Shahi opened up about her hopes for her love life.

“I want my next relationship to be about me. I’m not looking for a stepparent. I just want a boyfriend,” she added. “Someone that can just take me out and I can be on the beach and just be all sweaty and have sex all the time. I just want someone to purely service me, and if that grows into something else then great.”