I have no doubt you remember when Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid were a beloved celebrity couple. They were first linked in 2015, and they dated on and off for six years.
In September 2020, Gigi and Zayn even welcomed a daughter together, Khai. However, the couple broke up soon after Khai’s first birthday, following reports of a physical altercation between Zayn and Yolanda Hadid, Gigi’s mother.
Since their breakup, Gigi and Zayn have seemingly remained on pretty good terms. And now, appearing on the latest episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, the former One Direction star reflected on his relationship with Gigi after host Alex Cooper asked about his previous claim that he’s never “truly been in love.”
“At that moment in time, I might have thought it was love, but as I got older, I realized maybe it wasn’t,” he told Alex, acknowledging that his understanding of love is “always developing.” “Maybe it was lust, maybe it was this, maybe it was that? I don’t feel like it was love.”
He continued: “Just to say this on record, I will always love G because she is the reason my child is on this earth, and I have the utmost respect for her. But I don’t know if I was ever in love with her.”
As we mentioned, this isn’t the first time that Zayn has publicly confessed to this. In 2024, he said on the Zach Sang Show: “I don’t know if I’ve actually truly been in love at this point. You look back at it with new eyes, and you’re like, ‘Well, maybe I wasn’t in love there.’ Was it love or is it life experience that we are going through? Who knows.”
Zayn’s Call Her Daddy interview only dropped a day ago, and it hasn’t taken long for his quotes about love to stir up some serious backlash. On X, there are posts with 100,000+ likes, highlighting that it’s in very poor taste to publicly say that you never deeply loved someone you dated for multiple years and share a child with.
In Zayn’s defense, some people have argued that it isn’t “uncommon” to not truly understand romantic love until you’re a bit older. However, others have pushed back, saying that it’s not what Zayn said, but how, when, and where he said it that’s the real issue — plus the risk that it may have hurt Gigi.
