“Lust vs. love” — Zayn Malik reframes his most famous relationship on a major podcast
Zayn Malik is revisiting one of the most talked-about chapters of his public life — and doing it in a way that’s already sparking debate.
On a recent episode of Call Her Daddy, the former One Direction singer told host Alex Cooper that his understanding of love has shifted as he’s gotten older, and that what he once believed was “love” in a high-profile relationship may have been something else. In the conversation, Malik suggested his feelings at the time could have been closer to passion or infatuation than lasting love — describing it, at least in hindsight, as potentially “lust” rather than “love.”
The remarks quickly drew attention because of the relationship most listeners assume he’s referring to: his years-long, on-and-off romance with model Gigi Hadid, one of the most visible pairings in pop culture during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Malik and Hadid share a daughter, Khai, and Malik emphasized that he will “always” care about and respect Hadid because she’s the mother of his child — drawing a line between being “in love” and having love for someone in a co-parenting, family sense.
Malik also used the podcast appearance to explain why he doesn’t want his next relationship to play out in public the way his past ones did. He told Cooper that the scrutiny and constant outside commentary didn’t work for him and that he’s not interested in repeating it, framing privacy as less of a preference and more of a necessity for his personality and mental peace.
The “lust vs. love” framing wasn’t positioned as a dig at an ex so much as a reflection on how his definition of love has matured — but it landed as a headline anyway. Coverage of the episode noted that Malik has made similar comments before, including in a prior interview where he questioned whether he had ever truly been “in love,” and he reiterated on the podcast that he’s still sorting out what that word means for him now versus what it meant when he was younger and living under nonstop attention.
Beyond relationship talk, Malik’s conversation also touched on the oddities of dating as a famous person. He said he’s currently single and even described an attempt at using Tinder that didn’t go far because people didn’t believe it was actually him. The takeaway, as he framed it, was simple: he wants his personal life to be his personal life — not a public storyline that gets rewritten by strangers.
For listeners, the episode reads like a reset of Malik’s public narrative: less about nostalgia, more about boundaries. And for anyone who followed his past relationships in real time, it’s another reminder that “what it looked like” from the outside can be a very different thing than what it felt like on the inside.
