Cheryl Burke Says to Go on 'Dancing With the Stars' 'Single': 'It's So Intimate'
June 3 2024, Published 5:36 p.m. ET
Cheryl Burke is recommending anyone who goes on Dancing With the Stars going forward to not be in a relationship.
“Be single if you do Dancing With the Stars –– that’s all I’m saying,” the dancer, 40, said on the Friday, May 31, episode of her podcast, “S--, Lies, and Spray Tans."
“It’s an arranged marriage. It’s very much an arranged marriage. Seriously, it is black and white –– you either love each other or hate each other for real, and believe me there’s no gray [area],” she continued, adding that the partners spend "8 hours a day, 7 days a week together" for up to three months.
The brunette beauty, who was previously married to Matthew Lawrence, said the show can be tough on any romance.
“It’s so intimate, and you’re stuck with this person. Like, you better try and make it work at least, but yeah it’s really, you get close in so many ways. These celebrities are so vulnerable because in order to succeed, you have to strip it all down, and that alone. I bet you most of these married celebrities have never even done that with their wives,” she shared.
But things can take a turn if the competition goes in the wrong direction.
“If you get low scores, you don’t like each other, you blame one another, but if you have success on the show, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, you’re the best, you’re the best!'” she said.
Burke previously had a "little bit of a fling" with Chad Johnson when he competed on Season 10 of the ABC series. She also met her now ex-husband in 2007 when his older brother, Joey Lawrence, competed on the show.
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There have been several other couples who met on the series, including Kym Johnson and Robert Herjavec, Nikki Garcia and Artem Chigvintsev and more.
As OK! previously reported, Brooke Burke previously said working alongside Derek Hough included being vulnerable with one another.
"If anyone listened to the whole podcast, they would understand where I was coming from. I feel like it was an honest conversation about connection and you need that on the dance floor. What the celebrities and pros go through on the dance floor is much like love and life and romance — there's passion, it's intimate, there's fear, there's failure, you're learning how to communicate, there's struggle, you're learning how to dance, you're breathing in someone's arms for three months," she told OK!.
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"It was a love affair — in the ballroom, in my opinion," she added. "You're telling a love story on the dance floor if you're lucky, and the audiences sees that, and you can't fake that. There's passionate moments that are exchanged on the dance floor and not on the dance floor. That's what I meant! It was an adult conversation. I also understand why people who appear on the show fall in love and get married. That wasn't us. I was already married. It wasn't that I wished we could have or should have — it was the transparency of the intimate relationship that's inevitable."