Some love stories end with a wedding. Others end with a single called “Strangers” and a podcast interview two years later. When we first wrote about Avril Lavigne and Mod Sun in November 2022, the headline promised a third marriage; I am here, with the patience of someone who has watched a lot of engagements, to report that it never happened. The proposal was real, the ring was real, the Eiffel Tower was very real. The wedding stayed in the planning folder.
The Paris proposal that made fans start shopping for hats
Lavigne, now 42, has always had a type: men with guitars and tour buses. She was married to Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 from 2006 to 2010 and to Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger from 2013 until their separation in 2015. Mod Sun, born Derek Ryan Smith, fit the pattern with a twist: a rapper who had drifted into pop-punk, which in 2021 was the most Avril thing a man could do.
The two grew close around their 2021 duet “Flames”, released while she was making Love Sux. In spring 2022 he proposed in Paris, during a trip the couple shared on Instagram, and the photos had everything a fan could want: the tower, the ring, the two of them looking slightly stunned. My favorite detail is still how little irony there was in it. Pop-punk has spent twenty years pretending not to care, and here were two of its loudest people doing the most sincere thing in the book.
February 2023: the week everything changed
Less than a year later it was over. On February 21, 2023, TMZ and then People reported that the engagement had been called off; ET quoted a source on Lavigne’s side saying the couple had “broken up and called off their engagement.” For the record, our Nora Vance would remind me, Lavigne herself never posted a statement, and she still has not.
Mod Sun did. His Instagram post days later read: “In 1 week my entire life completely changed,” and added, “I’ll keep my head up + always listen my heart, even when it feels broken.” He signed off with “See you on stage,” which is the most musician way to say goodbye I have ever read. In July 2023 he released “Strangers,” a breakup song about the whole arc.
Tyga, Paris again, and a quiet ending
Within days of the split, Lavigne was photographed leaving Nobu Malibu with Tyga. Both camps called it friendship; by Paris Fashion Week in early March 2023 the two were kissing in public, and they made it Instagram-official soon after. Paris, it turns out, is where Avril’s romances go to become public. By June 2023 TMZ reported a mutual split after about four months, and apart from a Fourth of July party where they were seen together and a source told ET they were “just friends,” that was that.
Here is my read: nobody in this story behaved badly in public, which is rarer than it sounds. There were no captioned jabs, no deleted-photo forensics from either star, just two short chapters closed without slamming the door.
What Mod Sun says now
The most grown-up line in the whole saga came late. On Bunnie Xo’s Dumb Blonde podcast in November 2025, Mod Sun said: “We’re two different people, but I think I had a great influence on her.” And then, more generously: “If I run into you? It’s all love.” Two and a half years is about the time it takes most of us to say something like that out loud, so I will not hold the delay against him.
Avril on love, then and now
Lavigne has never been shy about her optimism. In her 2018 Billboard cover story, asked about two divorces, she had no regrets: “The way I looked at it is I married my long-terms,” she said, and, more simply, “I love love.” The same interview is where she described Lyme disease keeping her “in bed for f**king two years,” which is worth remembering whenever someone jokes that she disappeared. She was not on a break. She was ill, and then she came back.
And came back loudly. Her Greatest Hits Tour opened in Vancouver in May 2024 and ran to June 2025, 69 shows in all, and she was back on the When We Were Young bill in Las Vegas in October 2025. No new partner has been confirmed by Lavigne since Tyga; rumors have come and gone without a single post from her account to back them.
My take
The old headline said “make love not music,” and the last three years quietly proved the opposite: the engagement ended, the music did not. Avril Lavigne at 42 is touring the hits, singing to people who learned “Complicated” on a Discman, and keeping her love life off her own feed. If there is ever a third wedding, I suspect we will hear about it from her first, and probably in Paris.
Sources
- Avril Lavigne on Instagram: When We Were Young Fest, October 2025
- Avril Lavigne on Instagram (@avrillavigne)
- Mod Sun on Instagram (@modsun)
- Avril Lavigne, “I’m a Mess” (with YUNGBLUD), official video, YouTube
- Billboard Canada: Mod Sun speaks on the Avril Lavigne split (Dumb Blonde podcast), November 2025
- ET: Avril Lavigne talks ex-husbands and Lyme disease (Billboard cover story), October 2018
- ET: Avril Lavigne and Mod Sun engagement and split, February 2023
- Paper: Mod Sun responds to the breakup, February 2023
- HollywoodLife: Avril Lavigne and Tyga split (citing TMZ), June 2023
- ET: Lavigne and Tyga at a Fourth of July party after the split, July 2023
