Camila Cabello says dating Shawn Mendes is ‘scary because you have more to lose’
FALLING in love when you are the world’s biggest rising pop superstar isn’t easy.
When your new boyfriend is an equally successful music heart-throb, the complications could be overwhelming.
But I’m delighted to see the union of Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes — two thoroughly decent, well-mannered and uber-talented young singers — has been straightforward and pure.
After duetting on the summer smash Senorita, the pair went public with their relationship — and this week in London Camila opened up about turning a close friendship into a romance.
She tells me: “It’s almost more scary because you have more to lose. When you first start dating a person and you know nothing about them, there’s less at risk there. I think when you fall in love with somebody you’ve known for a long time, there’s more at stake.
“But it also feels more special because it feels like the love story you see in the movies of people who have known each other for a long time but been too stupid to realise it or say it and then it happens — and that’s beautiful too.”
The pair first got close over four years ago, working on the hit tune I Know What You Did Last Summer.
And Camila admits there was an initial attraction.
“Definitely there were feelings, but I think we were just too young to know what to do with them,” she says.
Especially with the pressures of working to establish their respective careers, which the Havana singer says in hindsight “was a mess”.
Shawn admitted this week that he pursued Camila — and eventually won his leading lady.
“I thought it was really sweet,” Camila says, blushing. So what was it that made the difference?
Nothing to do with the washboard abs Shawn recently showed off as the new face of Calvin Klein underwear, she insists.
“The thing I’ve always loved about Shawn so much is that he just radiates this goodness,” she says. “He’s always been so kind.”
The former star of US girl band Fifth Harmony will document her first two relationships on her highly anticipated album Romance, which is expected to be one of the pop hits of 2019.
Her first ended in a painful split earlier this year from British dating guru Matthew Hussey after an 18-month relationship. She was writing her songs in real-time, explaining: “I would get in a fight with someone and write about it the day after.”
But Camila — whose brilliant new song Cry For Me came out yesterday — is conscious of the process being complicated by the fact the songs are based on real people whose feelings could end up being hurt.
She says: “Every time I’ve written a song I’ve had to be like, ‘Oh my God, this is too much’. Because at this point it’s like the people I’m writing these songs about will know that they’re about them.
“Sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh, I wanna write that lyric but this would really crush that person’.
“So I don’t. That can be really challenging.” It’s clear that Camila was left devastated by her first heartbreak too, being so inconsolable on some days she couldn’t work.
She says: “To be honest, during that time I felt so much pain I couldn’t go to the studio.
“I remember having a writing session like, you know, the day after, and I was like, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do it’.
“It feels like a state of shock. It’s like you literally feel like, ‘Where am I?’ It must have chemically altered my body that I don’t remember a lot.”
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After a “few weeks of crying and confusion”, she was able to start to see the positive aspects of the relationship, which will infuse Romance.
Camila says: “I really loved that person. I look back at it fondly as a beautiful first love. When I’m 80 years old I think that the pain will be part of the beauty of it. Having heartache and losing something means that you had something and you felt something and you loved someone.
“Romance felt like the right title to me because I’m in this age where I see the magic of it all. Even in the chaos.”
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