Nicole Kidman says she was engaged to a mystery man in between breaking up with Tom Cruise and marrying Keith Urban. “I didn’t really want a relationship,” the 40-year-old actress says. “I just wanted my kids to have me, and I didn’t feel comfortable having some person in that small hubbub.”

“And then I got engaged to somebody … but it just wasn’t right,” she continues in Vanity Fair magazine’s October issue, on newsstands September 11. “I wasn’t ready. We weren’t ready.”

“I get engaged and I get married — that’s my thing,” she says, declining to reveal her former fiance’s identity. “I don’t want to date. I’m interested in a very, very deep connection.”