Stop judging Zayn – my idea of true love is always evolving, too

The former One Direction star has shocked the world by admitting he was never in love with Gigi Hadid, but it’s a very honest take on love and growth, says Charlotte Cripps, who has also had to make sense of her romantic relationships to herald in healthier love

Zayn Malik says he doesn’t think he was ever in love with supermodel Gigi Hadid throughout their six-year relationship – and he’s being criticised heavily for shouting about it from the rooftops.

The former One Direction star, 33 – who dated Hadid, 30, on and off from 2015 to 2021, before their romance came to a messy and toxic end when Malik got into an altercation with Hadid’s mother Yolanda – shares a daughter, Khai, now five, with Hadid.

That’s why his declaration this week that “maybe it was lust, maybe it was this, maybe it was that. I don’t feel like it was love”, on the podcast Call Her Daddy, hosted by Alex Cooper, is being interpreted as the worst possible thing you could ever say about an ex – especially one who is the mother of your child. And the “I was never in love” comment has blindsided Hadid, according to sources in The Sun (Hadid has moved on and is in a relationship with actor Bradley Cooper).

“Imagine Gigi sitting at home hearing that her [twenties] were basically a ‘misunderstanding’ of his feelings. There is being honest with yourself, and then there is being unnecessary,” one person wrote on X/Twitter.

Another said: “Zayn Malik said publicly he doesn’t know if he was in love with Gigi Hadid,” and “I’m sorry but what?”, while a third person commented, “This is a terrible thing to say publicly about someone you were with for six years.”

Stop giving Zayn a hard time – my idea of true love has changed over the years, too. I’m not saying that it’s right to hurt others, but what he is talking about needs to be delved into a bit deeper. It might seem like the greatest insult – and an inappropriate, cruel jibe – but it isn’t an off-the-cuff comment. He has previously confessed to having never “truly been in love” on the Zach Sang Show in 2024.

He is just speaking his truth, and shouldn’t be judged for it – it’s a very honest take on love and growth. I’ve also had to make sense of my former romantic relationships to herald in healthier love. And it actually says a lot about him, rather than being a measure of Hadid’s worth – it’s not personal.

Who hasn’t looked back at their relationships and realised they are no longer the same person that they were in their teens, twenties or thirties? As Malik said: “My understanding of love is always developing.” He added: “At that moment in time, I might have thought it was love, but as I’ve got older, I’ve realised maybe it wasn’t.”

And he said he still loved Hadid “a crazy amount”, just not in a romantic way, and that he “will always love her” as the mother of his child. But no, sorry, he doesn’t think he was in love with her “at that point”. As he says: “Otherwise, I would have been a better version of myself.”

Good for Zayn – surely this is a sign of emotional maturity and inner searching. It’s OK to realise that your feelings didn’t run as deeply as you once thought – in my case, I later learnt that my romantic choices had been driven by a bottomless pit of insecurity and a grasping need for approval.

The relationships I crave in my forties would have bored me to death in my twenties. But when I look back at my major relationships, in which I was dying for love in a Wuthering Heights kind of way, I realise now that what I called love isn’t love.

It has changed over the years from lust, intensity, codependency and obsession to calm, no drama, and wanting to know myself, rather than looking for somebody outside of myself to fix me, or make me whole.

I like being alone – and don’t need a comfort blanket. That doesn’t mean I didn’t really love my partners, whom I felt like I couldn’t live with or without, but something needed healing in me – my fear of abandonment.

I’d spent my whole life picking emotionally unavailable men – and believing that I was desperately in love with them. They were all broodingly handsome, funny and charismatic, but also avoidant in their own ways, and by longing for stability with them, I was setting myself up to fail.

And I always thought “this is the one” – but that was the trap. When my sister heard me talking endlessly about my all-consuming passion for one of my romantic partners, she was right to say I sounded like Catherine Earnshaw’s double, when she famously tells Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights, “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

I was always looking for my very own Heathcliff to transcend the boring, average romantic date. Yet I always thought “he was the one” when it happened.

A new study by researchers at the Kinsey Institute has shed new light on the popular belief that most people have one soulmate. According to its findings, published in Interpersona, most people fall in love twice in their lifetime. Almost a third (30.3 per cent ) have been in love twice, while 27.8 per cent have experienced it once. An unlucky 14.2 per cent say they have never been in love, while 16.8 per cent claim to have experienced romantic euphoria three times.

To be honest, I think I’ve felt it about six times, which puts me among the 11 per cent of the population who have been in love four or more times.

The truth is, most of us love multiple people throughout our lifetime – and as we grow and change, so do our needs and expectations. Relationships need work – and I had to take a hard look at myself, warts and all, in therapy to understand what part I had played in their demise – and my endless emotional pain.

I had to spend time on my own to begin the journey of loving myself. I had to re-parent myself – and learn self-acceptance. I had to look at all my relationships in the cold light of day, and analyse them so that I could change.

Like Malik, that doesn’t mean I didn’t love any of my former boyfriends. It’s just that these days, I don’t want to be waiting anxiously for a phone call, fantasising about running off into the sunset, obsessing over them, or cheating on them because I feel hurt. I’m not the same person I was – and if I met any of them today, I’m not sure I’d call it love.