This Guy Stinks

Zayn Malik, former One Direction member and now a fairly irrelevant solo artist, appeared on Call Her Daddy to promote his new album, where he stumbled into several blunders that revealed his rancid vibes.

Despite numerous public relationships with women like Little Mix’s Perrie Edwards and model Gigi Hadid, with whom he shares a five-year-old daughter, Malik said, “I don’t know if I’ve actually truly been in love at this point.” And that he just really loves being single.

“My understanding of love is always developing. 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 Cooper. “Maybe it was lust. Maybe it was this, maybe it was that. I don’t feel like it was love.” He is 33, by the way.

For someone whose fan base is made up almost entirely of women, going on a podcast to say you’ve never truly loved a woman and prefer being single does not seem like the smartest way to promote album sales. And it gets worse! (Because it always does.)

He added, “To be fair, just to say this on the record, I will always love [Gigi], because she is the reason my child is on this Earth, 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.” In that moment, every former Directioner-turned-grown woman cringed so hard it felt like the last remaining bone cells from our 12-year-old bodies disintegrated on the spot.

Essentially, he’s saying, love you bc you bore my child and take care of it. This guy STINKS! I can only imagine his PR manager sitting in the corner, cursing every god imaginable.

He added that these days he prefers being single because it is “freeing.” “I am that type of person who runs on my own clock, answers to myself. It was so freeing to me,” she said. “I could just do things, make plans, sleep in to whatever time I want.”

Of course! Everyone deserves independence! But does he have to diminish the women who came before in the process? Especially while telling the world he did not understand love when he chose to start a family with one of them?

Also, on the matter of Call Her Daddy, what are we doing here? I don’t think this is the female-forward content the podcast was born from. In my most optimistic mind’s eye, I’m imagining the old Cooper—before the corporate rebrand obscured her messy, chaotic former identity—fully cursing him out in her head.

But I suppose this is on me for never learning the evergreen lesson: every male celebrity is, at the end of the day, still a man.

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