Justin Timberlake on Britney Spears: ‘We Were Two Birds of the Same Feather’

Justin Timberlake spilled on his previous girlfriends to Vanity Fair's Vanessa Grigoriadis in what he probably figured would be a cover story, considering his willingness to talk (to some extent) about his personal life. (In the end, the allure of Kate Middleton was apparently seen as more bankable by the magazine.)

But while Timberlake talked about ex-girlfriend Jessica Biel ("She is the single-handedly most significant person in my life") and his thoughts on marriage ("I think the mistake is that people commit to who that person is right then and not the person they're going to become"), more interesting -- to us, at least -- was his discussion of Britney Spears.

Timberlake spoke about his romance with Spears as though it happened in a completely different era, which, we suppose, it did.

"I wish her the best -- that goes without saying. We haven't spoken in 9 or 10 years," he said. "We were two birds of the same feather -- small-town kids, doing the same thing. But then you become adults, and the way you were as kids doesn't make any sense. I won't speak on her, but at least for me, I was a totally different person... I just don't think we were normal; there was nothing normal about our existence. We spent way too much time being the biggest thing for teenyboppers."

And when we read this next quote, we couldn't help but think of current tween supernovas Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, who recently spent time together in Hawaii.

"It was exciting that we were having so much success and we could do whatever we wanted. And I mean that about everybody: Backstreet Boys, 'NSync, Britney, Christina," Timberlake said. "At that time, we could literally go, 'Oh, man, let's go to Bali,' and we'd be on a plane to Bali. We were little kids with big toys. You do the math -- that's not going to last... Ryan [Gosling] and I used to steal golf carts and go driving in the middle of the park to get milk shakes, and we never got in trouble for it. We thought we were big shit."

While Britney and Justin will probably never reunite, at least we'll always have this to remember them by.