Adele revealed more to Oprah Winfrey, as well as performed at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, in her Adele One Night Only concert special on Sunday, Nov. 14 at 8:30 p.m. ET on CBS. Here’s everything she’s said about boyfriend Paul, her divorce from ex Simon Konecki, dating rumors, as well as the scoop on who her new album’s about.
Who is Adele dating?
Adele has been Paul since the beginning of 2021, reports Vogue. The pair first appeared in public at Game 5 of the NBA finals on July 17, which had the rumor mill buzzing. “I didn’t mean to go public with it. I just wanted to go to the game,” she told the magazine. “I just love being around him. I just love it.” But the couple did discuss their attendance together on the way to the game. “He was like, ‘What are people going to say?’ And I was like, ‘That you signed me. As an athlete. You’re my agent,’” Adele said. “And he was like, ‘Okay, cool.’” His relaxed demeanor was one of the things that drew Adele to Paul. “He’s not frazzled by it [being in public] at all,” she told British Vogue. “It feels like it’s consistent and considerate enough that I don’t care who knows.” In turn, she feels calm when she’s with him. “I don’t feel anxious or nervous or frazzled. It’s quite the opposite. It’s wild,” she told Vogue. “I’m a 33-year-old divorced mother of a son, who’s actually in charge. The last thing I need is someone who doesn’t know where they’re at, or what they want. I know what I want. And I really know what I don’t want.” The couple became Instagram official on Sept. 18, when Adele posted a picture of herself with Paul with a heart emoji at the wedding of Lakers player Anthony Davis. Now that the tea had been spilled, they were free to make their second courtside appearance on NBA’s opening night at the Warriors vs. Lakers game on Oct. 19. They were also spotted across the pond in Adele’s home country of England in early November, where she gave a performance at the London Palladium, her first in the UK in four years.
Who is Rich Paul?
Although he’s not as famous as Adele, Paul is also fabulously successful and wealthy as a sports agent to top athletes in the NBA and NFL. He is the owner of the Klutch Sports Group agency, and boasts clients such as LeBron James and Anthony Davis. According to a profile in The New Yorker, Paul has three children but has never been married. Paul is also releasing a memoir about his childhood growing up in Cleveland entitled Lucky Me, which will be published by Roc Lit 101, the publishing division of Jay-Z’s entertainment company Roc Nation. “Lucky Me is the story of every young Black man who grew up like me,” Paul said in a statement announcing the book. “I want to use my story to uplift and inspire those who lived this and educate those who didn’t. I cannot tell you what it means to partner with my friend and mentor Jay-Z on this project.”
How did Adele meet Rich Paul?
Although they’ve been dating since early 2021, Adele told Vogue they had been friends for a while before that. “He was always there, I just didn’t see him,” she said. The pair first met on the dance floor at a party a couple of years ago. “I was a bit drunk. I said, ‘Do you want to sign me? I’m an athlete now,’” she said. “He was dancing. All the other guys were just sitting around. He was just dancing away.” Making peace with her dying father, with whom she’d had a difficult relationship, earlier this year led her to be finally open to real love. “I think I’ve never been fully in any of my relationships,” she told RollingStone in November. “I always had this fear from a really young age that you’re going to leave me anyway, so I’m going to leave or I’m not going to invest myself in anything.” But after her father passed, “I’ve felt so calm ever since then. It really did set little me free,” she told Rolling Stone. It was then that she was able to reconnect with Paul. “Rich just incredibly arrived,” she told Vogue. Since then, she told Rolling Stone she’s had the most “incredible, openhearted and easiest” relationship ever.
Is Adele engaged?
Not that we know of, although Adele did spark some rumors by wearing a gold band on her wedding finger in London recently. However, when she left her London Palladium concert a few days later, the gold band wasn’t there—although she was sporting a gorgeous sparkler on her other hand.
Who is Adele’s husband?
Adele’s relationship with Paul is her first publicly confirmed attachment since her divorce from ex-husband Simon Konecki, which was finalized in March 2021. And although she had referred to the charity CEO as “her husband” for years because they had a child (they’d been together since 2011), the couple was really only legally hitched since 2018; they separated in 2019. “The timeline the press have of my relationship, my marriage, is actually completely wrong,” the 33-year-old told British Vogue. “We got married when I was 30… and then I left.” Why did they split? “I was just going through the motions and I wasn’t happy,” she told Vogue. “Neither of us did anything wrong. Neither of us hurt each other or anything like that. It was just: I want my son to see me really love, and be loved. It’s really important to me.” The divorce was, in a way, a preemptive strike before things got inescapably bad. “It just wasn’t right for me any more. I didn’t want to end up like a lot of other people I knew,” she told British Vogue. “I wasn’t miserable miserable, but I would have been miserable had I not put myself first. But, yeah, nothing bad happened or anything like that.” In her sitdown with Winfrey, Adele added about ending her marriage, “It was just exhausting trying to keep going with it. It’s a process, the process of a divorce.” Although it was difficult, she prioritized her own happiness—something that, she says, women aren’t necessarily encouraged to do. “I was embarrassed. I was really embarrassed. That thing of not being able to make something work,” she told British Vogue. “We’ve been trained as women to keep trying, even by the movies we watched when we were little. At the time it broke my heart, but I actually find it so interesting now. How we’re told to suck it up.” But she’s still on good terms with Konecki—in fact, he lives across the street from her in Los Angeles. They co-parent and still do family movie nights. “He’s not one of my exes. He’s the dad of my child,” she told Vogue; she likewise told British Vogue, “I’d trust him with my life… I definitely chose the perfect person to have my child with."
Who is Adele’s son?
Adele’s son with Konecki is 9-year-old Angelo, whose birth she credits with keeping her grounded and away from tortured artist territory. “Sometimes I get frightened by the idea of where my life would have gone had I not gotten pregnant with Angelo,” she told Vogue. “They both saved me. There was a real reason why Simon came into my life.” For his part, Angelo doesn’t yet quite realize how famous his mother is. When she took him to his first concert in 2018, to see Taylor Swift, she told Vogue, “his jaw dropped. I got really annoyed! I was like, ‘Excuse me! This is what I do, you know.’ He said, ‘When we go on tour, should I have a seat next to me with Taylor Swift’s name on it for Taylor to come?’” The divorce was, understandably, very hard for Angelo. “He has so many simple questions for me that I can’t answer, because I don’t know the answer,” she told Vogue. “Like, ‘Why can’t we still live together?’ ‘That’s just not what people do when they get divorced.’ ‘But why not?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t f***ing know. That’s not what society does.’ And, ‘Why don’t you love my dad anymore? ‘And I’d be like, I’ do love your dad. I’m just not in love.’ I can’t make that make sense to a 9-year-old.”
What is Adele’s new album about?
Not surprisingly, 30 is Adele’s divorce album, which she made largely for her son. “I just felt like I wanted to explain to him, through this record, when he’s in his twenties or thirties, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness,” she told British Vogue. “It made him really unhappy sometimes. And that’s a real wound for me that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to heal.” The songs on the album, which Rolling Stone says were written mainly in the summer of 2019, are not about current boyfriend Paul. “The whole album is sort of dedicated to my son more than anything, but yeah it’s about my relationship with his dad and with him, but also the relationship I have with myself,” she said on Britain’s Hits Radio Breakfast. Instead of angry breakup songs blaming her exes, “It was more me divorcing myself,” she laughed to Vogue. “I realized that I was the problem. Cause all the other albums are like, ‘You did this! You did that! Fk you! Why can’t you arrive for me?’ Then I was like, ‘Oh, st, I’m the running theme, actually. Maybe it’s me!’” The inward-looking tracks explore how, through the breakup, she learned more about who she really is. “I feel like this album is self-destruction, then self-reflection and then sort of self-redemption,” she told British Vogue. “But I feel ready. I really want people to hear my side of the story this time.”
Who is Adele’s new song about?
Adele wrote 30’s first single, “Easy on Me” about her split with Konecki, with the song initially coming to her when she “was singing a cappella in the shower” back in 2018, she told British Vogue. “It’s like, I left the marriage. Be kind to me as well. It was the first song I wrote for the album and then I didn’t write anything else for six months after because I was like, ‘OK, well, I’ve said it all.” She revealed a bit more about the song’s meaning to Hits Radio Breakfast. “If you’re the one that’s sort of initiating the [breakup] discussion, it’s sort of like hang on a minute, go easy on me, you know, it’s not my fault,” she said. “So it’s just sort of really about that, in the way that, you know, the decision that I made really.”
Did Adele date Skepta?
In mid-2020, rumors surfaced that Adele was dating British rapper Skepta after some seemingly flirty Instagram messages. But when she appeared on Saturday Night Live in October 2020, she make a point of noting that she was single. After the show, she wrote on Instagram, “I’m going back to my cave now to be the (single) cat lady that I am!” Adele does delve into dating post-divorce on the 30 tracks “Can I Get It, “All Night Parking,” “Woman Like Me” and “Oh My God.” Although there was some speculation that some of the songs were about Skepta, Rolling Stone points out that Adele had finished the album before the Skepta rumors started. Adele had known Skepta for a long time before that, though, posting an Instagram of him captioned “Tottenham boy” and a heart emoji way back in 2016 (both artists are from Tottenham in London). And 30’s dating songs are about somebody that Adele was involved with after Konecki and before Paul. “[It] was a great learning curve and nice to feel loved, but it was never going to work,” she told Rolling Stone about the relationship, in part because it was long-distance. She also admits she found the dating process post-divorce difficult before she met Paul. “I lasted five seconds [dating in Los Angeles],” she told Rolling Stone. Plus, “you can’t set me up on a fing blind date! I’m like, ‘How’s that going to work?’ There’ll be paparazzi outside and someone will call [gossip site] Deuxmoi, or whatever it’s fing called! It ain’t happening.”
Did Adele date Stormzy?
Adele has also been friends with another British rapper, Stormzy, for years, and he recently attended her London Palladium concert. His 2017 song “Big for Your Boots” even has a line referencing Adele—“You’re never too big for Adele”—and he captioned a pic of her backstage at one of his shows that year, “best day ever.” But there doesn’t seem to be much to back up that they ever dated—some gossip even had it that Stormzy introduced her to Skepta! “99.9 percent of the stories that have been written about me are absolutely made up,” she told Vogue about romance rumors. No matter who she dated previously, we’re glad that Adele has found happiness in her private life with Paul to match her amazing musical success. Next, take a look at Adele’s music evolution with the 20 best Adele songs ever.
