AJ Michalka shared her first-ever kiss with ex Joe Jonas, but it’s not exactly her fondest memory.
“We were, like, 15,” Michalka, 32, quipped during the Thursday, November 16, episode of“The Viall Files” podcast when host Nick Viall asked whether Jonas, 34, was a good kisser. “We were so young. Eh, I think we were both sloppy and inexperienced.”
AJ — one half of the Aly & AJ band alongside her older sister, Aly Michalka — and Jonas started dating in early 2006 after Aly & AJ opened for Joe and his brothers Kevin Jonas and Nick Jonas on the Jonas Brothers’ Living Room Tour. AJ and Joe ultimately split in December 2006.
AJ and Joe were two of many former Disney Channel stars who started dating after costarring on the TV network.
“It was just so incestual,” AJ noted on Thursday. “Everyone was dating each other, like Zac [Efron] and Vanessa [Hudgens], Miley [Cyrus] and Nick [Jonas], Selena [Gomez] and Nick, [and] me and Joe. It became this cesspool.”
After AJ and Joe went their separate ways, he moved on with the likes of Demi Lovato, Taylor Swift, Camilla Belle and Gigi Hadid. Joe married Sophie Turner in 2019 before they welcomed daughters Willa, 3, and Delphine, 16 months. Us Weekly confirmed in September that Joe filed for divorce from Turner, 27, after four years of marriage.
When Viall, 43, attempted to press AJ for a reaction to Joe and Turner’s messy divorce and custody battle, she declined to comment and ended up chuckling. AJ did note that she “loves” Turner and “thinks she’s so talented.”
AJ continued: “I don’t have a dog in the fight, like, I can’t pick a team because I [only] know a little bit about it.”
AJ has since found love with Good Trouble star Josh Pence, whom she’s been dating since 2017. The twosome even collaborated on Aly & AJ’s 2020 song “Dead on the Beach.”
“Just an open dialogue and open communication [helps us],” AJ said on the podcast. “I think it’s hard when you’re touring and you’re on the road for three months and you’re not seeing your loved one consistently. You have to have some sort of connection that you at least build virtually that can be your, like, ‘This is sustaining me for three months even if I’m not seeing this person.’”
The Goldbergs alum further noted that she and Pence, 41, are “super communicative” and are “always very in touch with their emotions.”
“He’s been in therapy for 20 years and he brings that into our relationship, which I love because it actually really helps me,” AJ said. “It’s a really beautiful partnership, and he’s in the industry too, so he gets it even though he’s not a touring musician [but] an actor.”
