Perrie Edwards is looking back on her 2015 split from Zayn Malik, hinting that he may have moved on to his next relationship prior to their breakup.
“Let’s just say there was … a bit of an overlap, you see, and I think when you’re moving on with somebody else, you always get on better,” Edwards, 32, claimed on the Tuesday, June 9, episode of Jamie Laing’s “From Great Company” podcast. “When you’re the one left behind, that’s when it’s hard, because it’s like, ‘Oh s***, they’ve left me for someone more beautiful than me, someone better than me,’ whatever it is, that’s how it felt at the time.”
The Little Mix singer added that the “nail in the coffin” was seeing another woman, whom she did not name, in a music video for a song that Malik, 33, allegedly wrote about Edwards. (She did not specify the song, but Malik’s 2016 music video for “Pillow Talk” featured his then-girlfriend, Gigi Hadid. Malik and Hadid, 31, dated on and off from 2015 to 2021 and share daughter Khai, 5.)
“I had, like, serious breakdowns, because it wasn’t just the heartbreak I was dealing with,” Edwards recalled of the aftermath of her split from Malik. “I was dealing with everybody looking at me and I felt ridiculed. … I also was getting followed every two seconds and asked about it 24/7, and it was the headlines, it was everywhere, and it was a lot.”
Edwards noted that her dad struggled to see her hurting.
“I thought, ‘This is all getting a bit much.’ And then I started crying my eyes out, and then my dad started crying,” she said. “He was like, ‘I don’t know how I can take this pain away.’ And I’m like, ‘You can’t, nobody can. This is hellish.’”
Edwards and Malik met on The X Factor UK in 2011 and began dating shortly after. The pair got engaged in 2013 but ultimately called it quits in 2015.
“There’s so much that people don’t know about that I would never say, even though I’ve just spilled some beans, but there’s so much that went into it — that I would never talk about — that I went through,” Edwards continued.
Edwards claimed that her breakup from Malik made her realize the relationship dynamic was “very unhealthy.”
“And that, I mean, you can say it was young puppy love or whatever, and you’re like whisked away with it,” she said, adding that she has since experienced “healthy love” with fiancé Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, whom she began dating in 2017. The couple share son Axel, 4, and daughter Alanis, 4 months.
“It’s so nice. It doesn’t make you feel sick to your stomach all the time. It doesn’t make you feel itchy,” Edwards said of her romance with Oxlade-Chamberlain, 32. “It doesn’t make you feel like you’re not worthy or you’re not good enough or you could be doing everything better. And it doesn’t feel competitive. It doesn’t feel toxic. Like, that’s exactly what I would say it was. It doesn’t feel like that when you experience it the good way.”
Us Weekly reached out to reps for Malik for comment.
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