“Everything I Had Built Collapsed”

Ólafur Kristján Guðmundsson says his life collapsed after he and his wife of many years divorced in early 2022. Today, the hOFFMAN singer says he has come to terms with the breakup and that life has never been better.

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Yes, I hit that wall at 150 kilometres per hour

For more than two decades, Ólafur lived in a heterosexual marriage. He and his former wife had three children, a dog, a home and a car. He also pursued education and held reasonably well-paid jobs. From the outside, he said, it could sound like a perfect life. Inside, however, he felt an emptiness he had never addressed.

Ólafur says he had known since early childhood that he was bisexual. He recalls being attracted to both a female swimming teacher and a male physical education teacher, but continued dating women, perhaps because he did not dare to pursue anything else. He did not openly discuss his sexuality until after the divorce, when he found himself at a crossroads.

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Everything I had built collapsed. It all gave way.

He describes the divorce as a difficult grieving process that transformed his life. He says he always loved his wife and children, and that the marriage had been good in many ways, but he had carried a part of his identity that he was not ready to reveal. After the separation, he increasingly used alcohol and drugs to dull the pain. Before long, he says, he had lost control of his substance use.

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I had known it since I was a child, but I was always dating and meeting girls, perhaps because I did not dare to pursue anything else.

Ólafur now speaks about that period in Dagmál, following the release of hOFFMAN’s album VIÐ. The album includes lyrics about his inner struggles, his changing identity and his reckoning with the past. He is now married to his soulmate, Stefán Svan Aðalheiðarson.

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I simply was not ready to open up about something like that at the time. I did not have the courage then.