Britney Spears has been married three times throughout her life, but her first marriage only lasted 55 hours.
The singer, 41, discussed the brief marriage in her upcoming memoir, The Woman in Me, which will be released on 24 October. In an excerpt obtained by Time magazine, Spears wrote about her marriage to her childhood friend, Jason Alexander, during a New Year’s trip to Las Vegas.
Spears explained she was on a trip with a group of friends, which included Paris Hilton, when she and Alexander ended up spending the night together.
“He and I got s***faced,” she wrote. “I don’t even remember that night at all, but from what I’ve pieced together, he and I lounged around the hotel room and stayed up late watching movies - Mona Lisa Smile and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - then had the brilliant idea of going to A Little White Chapel at three thirty in the morning.”
The “Toxic” singer went on to say that the marriage was not out of love, but only because she was drunk and bored. “People have asked me if I loved him. To be clear: he and I were not in love,” the memoir reads. “I was just honestly very drunk - and probably, in a more general sense at that time in my life, very bored.”
According to the excerpt, her family had shown up to Las Vegas the next day furious over what she had done. The marriage was then annulled 55 hours after it had started.
“They made way too big a deal out of innocent fun,” she recalled. “Everybody has a different perspective on it, but I didn’t take it that seriously. I thought a goof-around Vegas wedding was something people might do as a joke. Then my family came and acted like I’d started World War III. I cried the whole rest of the time I was in Las Vegas.”
Spears added that she viewed the incident as one of the first times her family expressed wanting a large amount of control over her life.
“My family was so against the wedding that I started to think maybe I’d accidentally committed a brilliant act,” she wrote. “Because I realised: something about me being under their control and not having a stronger connection to someone else had become very, very important to them... Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that, by this point, I was supporting them financially.”
The same year she married and divorced Alexander, Spears went on to marry her second husband Kevin Federline. The “Gimme More” singer and the former backup dancer first met at a club in 2004, before sparking a relationship. After just three months of dating, the two tied the knot in September that year during a surprise wedding ceremony. Weeks before their one-year wedding anniversary, they welcomed their first child, son Sean Preston. They welcomed their second son, Jayden James, in 2006, eight weeks before Spears filed for divorce. They finalised their divorce in 2007.
However the short-lived marriage was not the last time Spears had a run-in with her ex-husband.
In 2022, Alexander made headlines when he tried to attend Spears’ wedding to her most recent husband, Sam Asghari, as he could be heard saying in a video that he was going to crash the nuptials. “She’s my first wife, my only wife,” Alexander reportedly told security. “I’m her first husband, I’m here to crash the wedding.”
After he was arrested for trespassing, vandalism, and battery, a security guard later revealed in court that when Alexander crashed the wedding, he also tried to enter Spears’ bedroom.
The Woman in Me hits shelves in the US and UK on 24 October.
