LI's Mariah Carey opens up about her love life: 'I'm kind of a prude'

Pop star Mariah Carey is speaking candidly about her love life, her Times Square New Year's Eve mishap and how young singers today have it easier than those who came up in her own generation.

"I haven't had that many [relationships] but there has been a variety pack," the five-time Grammy Award winner, who turned 50 in March, says in the new issue of Cosmopolitan. "I've only been with five people in my life, so I'm kind of a prude, honestly, compared to most others in the field."

Among those relationships was her first husband, music executive Tommy Mottola, her 20-years-older mentor whom she married in June 1991, almost exactly a year after the release of her blockbuster self-titled debut album. "You might want to picture a child bride," says Carey, who was born in Huntington and raised in Greenlawn, graduating from Harborfields High School in 1987. "There was a conscious effort to keep me as this all-American, whatever that means, girl. It was very controlled. There was no freedom for me as a human being. It was almost like being a prisoner.”

Mottola in his 2013 autobiography "Hitmaker: The Man and His Music” conceded that becoming involved with his protégé was "absolutely wrong and inappropriate." The two divorced in 1997.

Of her Times Square travails, in which poorly functioning earpieces forced her to stop singing and revealed a lip-sync track during her New Year's Eve 2016 performance, "If people think that's the worst thing that's ever happened to me, then first of all, they haven't studied my career well enough," she says. "After what I've been through, who really gives a [expletive] if my monitor broke, fell off, came out of my ears because the stupid robe was too loose? These things happen and it's over. My true fans stick with me, and the rest of the people will get over it."

And of today's singers, she opines, "They have no idea what I went through as a child to even get to be an 18-year-old girl with a record deal," adding, "This was before you could just go on YouTube and sing."