Her marriage to Ryan Reynolds was a “beautiful thing.” She and Sean Penn were just “seeing each other.” And her current romance, with ad man Nate Naylor, is something “totally bizarre” – because he’s not used to dating a celebrity.

Nevertheless, Scarlett Johansson finds life pretty good right now.

The actress, poised to open in The Avengers in her Iron Man 2 role of Natasha Romanoff, tells Vogue magazine, “It’s been a good time. I’ve had peace. Relative peace. I just want to work on things that are really hard, and when I’m not working on things that are really hard, I want to hang out with people I like to be with, and that’s it.”

This clearly includes New York–based advertising creative director Naylor, though the 27-year-old says that having the paparazzi trail them around Manhattan and in Hawaii “must be very strange for him … I mean, it’s got to be an adjustment for him way more than it was for me [when my career started] at 19. But he’s really remarkably good about it.”

Of her marriage to Reynolds (they wed in 2008), Johansson says, “We entered our relationship with love and it’s with love and kindness we leave it. While privacy isn’t expected, it’s certainly appreciated.” Before the union was dissolved, she says, “It was “a hard time? … I was feeling very out of my own skin.”

And while their divorce, which was finalized last summer, was “comically amicable,” she says, the initial split itself “was horrible. Of course it’s horrible. It was devastating. It really throws you. You think that your life is going to be one way, and then, for various reasons or whatever, it doesn’t work out. … It’s like the loneliest thing you’ll ever do, in some way.”

The experience, however, has not soured her on marriage.

“The falling in love and getting married and making that commitment,” she says, “I think it’s nice to know that you’re capable of loving somebody in that way. I think it’s a rare opportunity.”

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