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Lily Allen says she once felt drawn to the tradwife movement. In an interview with The Times published Monday, she looked back on her marriages and said that she used to believe in “this myth someone’s going to pick you up and make everything OK. I haven’t seen much evidence of it.”
Allen connected her desire to uphold conventional gender roles in her previous marriages to her complicated relationship with her parents, film producer Alison Owen and actor Keith Allen, who she once described to The Guardian as not being “particularly good at parenting.”
“I grew up feeling that I was a vehicle for male pleasure,” she said. “I never really considered my own needs. My priority has been to make sure I don’t get rejected or abandoned. Therefore, I’m prioritising my partner’s enjoyment because the first thing I’m protecting is my safety.”
The singer shares two children — Ethel, 14, and Marnie, 13 — with her ex-husband Sam Cooper, whom she married in 2011 (they divorced in 2018). Allen later married Stranger Things actor David Harbour in 2020, and they separated last February. Their turbulent relationship was chronicled in the singer’s musical roman à clef West End Girl last year, where she described an unnamed husband’s infidelity in tortuous detail.
Allen told The Times that the success of West End Girl and its accompanying tour has helped her become more autonomous, giving her “a sense of agency and accomplishment.” “I don’t need to be taken care of any more,” she said. “There’s definitely a sense of liberation in that. There’s always going to be a part of me that wants a happy ending — but also, not really. I’m starting to see through that.”
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