Why Zayn Malik Says He Was Never 'In Love' With Ex Gigi Hadid
Zayn Mailk just dropped a bombshell about his relationship with ex-girlfriend Gigi Hadid. The former One Direction band member revealed he was never “in love” with Hadid, with whom he shares daughter Kahi, born in 2020.
In a Feb. 11 interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, host Alex Cooper asked Malik to clarify his comments from a 2024 interview on The Zach Sang Show, where he said, “I don’t know if I’ve actually truly been in love at this point.” He famously dated Hadid from 2015 to 2021, so this was obviously a huge bombshell at the time. In the interview today, he agreed with his previous statement.
“Yeah, because my understanding of love is always developing,” he said. “You know, at that moment in time, I might have thought it was love, but as I got older, I realized maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was lust. Maybe it was this, maybe it was that. Um, I don’t feel like it was love.”
Even though he doesn’t believe he had romantic feelings for Hadid (ever?! Because, again, it was a six-year relationship!), he does love her as the mother of his child. “And to be fair, just to say this on record, I will always love G. ‘Cause she’s the reason my child is, you know, on this earth,” Malik continued. “And I have the utmost respect for her. I will always love her, but I don’t know if I was ever in love with her.”
He added, “I have so much respect for this woman and I do love her a crazy amount. But, yeah, no, I don’t think I was in love with her at that point, otherwise I would have been a better version of myself.”
Despite not having any romantic feelings for Hadid, Malik and Hadid both seem very respectful and mature when it comes to co-parenting their daughter. In an April 2025 cover interview with Vogue, the Victoria’s Secret Angel shared her own insights into their relationship now.
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“Zayn and I do our custody schedules months in advance,” she revealed. “That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t change here and there, but we help each other out and have each other’s backs.” Hadid described her co-parenting relationship with Malik as one with “love, and a feeling of camaraderie.”
The only downside? How public it all is. “There is the hard part of the world knowing this much, and thinking they know everything,” she continued. “And at the end of the day, we’re not interested in giving everyone our whole story.”
“What we are interested in is raising our daughter together, with so much respect for each other, and not just as co-parents, but what we’ve been through together,” she added. What else could you need when co-parenting with an ex?
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