22 February,2026 08:20 AM IST | Mumbai | Akshita Maheshwari
Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid at the Met Gala in 2026. PIC/GETTY IMAGES
When you grow up a Directioner in India, it's hard not to be in love with Zayn Malik. As a result, I have followed his and model Gigi Hadid's relationship very closely over the years. I remember seeing the Pillowtalk music video for the first time in 2016 and losing my mind. I don't even know what my 12-year-old self even understood from that. I remember being 14 and hearing about the couple breaking up. All my friends and I were heartbroken. You think parasocial relationships are bad now? Hell hath no fury like a teenage girl scorned.
Then, they got back together. They even had a little baby girl. I turned 16. They broke up again. By this time, I was long over One Direction and couldn't care less about the lame boy band anymore. Media reports claimed that Malik had struck Hadid's mother Yolanda Hadid. Malik denied those claims. Malik went dark. He would release his albums but stayed away from all press. Much more happened in the 1D universe but Malik mostly stayed off-headlines. And then last week, he claimed he was never "in love" with the mother of his child.
Stills from Zayn Malik's Pillowtalk music video, which was the on-screen debut of the couple. PIC/PINTEREST@JEN
Appearing on Call Her Daddy, hosted by Alex Cooper, Malik reflected on his past relationship and said that while he will always love and respect Hadid, he doesn't believe he was ever truly in love at that time. The Internet reacted instantly and loudly. Headlines reduced the nuance to a single emotional gut punch: He was never in love with Gigi Hadid.
What many critics ignored was the second half of Malik's reflection. He framed his realisation as a critique of his younger self. If he had truly understood love then, he would have behaved better within the relationship. That statement is not so much "I never loved her" but more "I should have loved her better". At least in my interpretation! I am happy Malik is able to look at his relationship through this lens. Growth sometimes involves admitting that past versions of ourselves were incapable of loving well, even when we believed we were.
The anger online taps into a deeply personal fear. For many listeners, this is a nightmare scenario. The idea that someone you built a life with, someone who once professed love publicly, could later reinterpret that love as something else, feels destabilising. In a dating culture already defined by ambiguity, ghosting, and emotional uncertainty. In other words, people aren't reacting as fans.
They are reacting as people who have been or fear becoming "the Gigi" in a relationship. Parasocial relationships! Modern relationships are uniquely fragile. People fall in love intensely, and sometimes prematurely, only to realise years later that what they felt was attachment, dependency, timing, or even longing for stability rather than love itself. Malik's statement forces an uncomfortable truth into the open: love is not always understood correctly while we are living it. And that personal growth often demands exactly that - reassessment.
The backlash also exposes how celebrity discourse struggles with nuance. Social media thrives on absolutes: villain or victim, love or betrayal, truth or lie. Malik's reflection sits awkwardly in the grey area between those binaries. He simultaneously expresses enduring love, respect, regret, and emotional evolution, a complexity that doesn't translate easily into viral outrage. Perhaps the real takeaway isn't whether Malik was in love years ago. It's that people evolve, definitions shift, and emotional honesty rarely sounds romantic when spoken aloud. Growth, after all, is rarely poetic.
My understanding of love is always developing. At that moment in time, I might've thought it was love, but as I've gotten older, I've realised maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was lust, maybe it was this, maybe it was that. I don't feel like it was love. And to say this on record, I will always love G cause she's 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. I felt like when I said it, I think people took it a tap away. So I'm just like, I have so much respect for this woman and I do love her, a crazy amount, but no. I don't think I was in love with her at that point, otherwise I would've been a better version of myself."
