Perrie Edwards admitted she felt “embarrassed” when she broke up with Zayn Malik. The singer also described their relationship as “toxic” despite him being her first real love.
Speaking on the We Need to Talk podcast, the Little Mix singer said their relationship was “pretty easy at first.” However, it got “more difficult,” and the whole thing became “toxic”.
When their engagement ended, she said the heartbreak devastated her, and the public scrutiny made it worse. “It was just a lot, it was too much. It was just everywhere. It followed me like a bad smell… I felt embarrassed. I felt weird. Really sad. Going through all these emotions and going through it with everyone staring at me was like, it was mortifying,” Perrie recalled.
Perrie, who dated the former One Direction star from 2011 to 2015, met Malik when she competed on The X Factor with Little Mix. She explained that it felt “refreshing” at first because they bonded over similar experiences, but the constant attention made their romance difficult.
The pair tried to keep their relationship private and explained that “it was nice to have something private in general.”
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Zayn Reaches Out
The Forget About Us singer revealed that Malik reached out to her three years after their split. Perrie admitted the situation felt awkward because she had to tell her then-new boyfriend, footballer Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, that Zayn had messaged her.
“I remember there was one point my ex [Zayn] reached out and I didn’t know how to handle the situation because I’d been with Alex for like a year and a half, two years. And I felt a bit uncomfortable about it,” she said.
Perrie says that she “learned a lot” from her time with Malik. However, the experience left her carrying fears into her current relationship with her fiancé, Oxlade-Chamberlain. The pair shares their three-year-old son, Axel.
