NEED TO KNOW
- Lily Allen said dating after her split has been “bitterly disappointing”
- Allen said dating “just feels like climbing up a mountain”
- She and David Harbour separated after four years of marriage, a source told PEOPLE in February
Lily Allen is opening up about the difficulties of dating after the end of her marriage.
The “Smile” singer, 40, said in an interview with Perfect magazine that upon emerging from the rubble of her marriage to Stranger Things star David Harbour, she’s found the dating scene to be “much harder” to navigate than it was six years ago.
“It’s bitterly disappointing. There’s an element of humiliation and shame around it,” she said. “The world doesn’t portray women of my age as being desirable. And it just feels like climbing up a mountain.”
Allen added that she realizes a romantic relationship won’t be “the answer to all of my problems,” but it does feel “like the easier option.”
She and Harbour, 50, were married in 2020, and a source confirmed their split to PEOPLE in February after four years of marriage. She is mom to daughters Marnie, 12, and Ethel, 13, with ex-husband Sam Cooper.
Lily Allen and David Harbour at a premiere in London in December 2023.
JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty
A source told PEOPLE in September that Allen — who will release her new album West End Girl on Oct. 24 — had slowly started to reenter the dating scene.
“Her marriage had been crumbling for a while, and it put her in a terrible mental state,” the source said. “It was very stressful and sad. Lily is a fighter though.”
The source added that the star had spent time in Europe over the summer and was “casually dating and doing much better.”
“She’s focused on her [daughters] and is starting to feel like herself again,” the source said.
As for the breakdown of her marriage, Allen described the breakup to Perfect as “really sad.”
“It’s hard for me to not have my person, you know? And I am quite a codependent person,” she said. “And I find it difficult to lean on the people who are available to me when I’m missing the comfort and stability of what is not available to me.”
Lily Allen at Milan Fashion Week in September 2022.
Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images
She continued, “And I know that what I have to do is be able to make myself happy and that is a source of extreme irritation for me… It means doing the f—ing work, and I feel like I’ve been doing the work for f—ing ages. I’m exhausted by it. And I thought it was done. I thought it was happily ever after, you know?”
On her podcast Miss Me? In February, Allen revealed she’d spent several weeks at a treatment center in order to be her “strongest self” for her daughters.
“I felt like it was getting harder and harder for me to be able to show up for them in the way that they need me to,” she said. “It was a really big decision to have to leave them for a few weeks to go and focus on myself, but ultimately it was for them. Yes, it’s for me, but it’s for them so that I can get us through this bit. I needed some help to be able to do that.”
