Lily Allen opened up on her BBC podcast Miss Me?, and is not holding back some of the more intimate and vulnerable details of the couple and about herself.
The conversation was prompted by the podcast’s episode theme, “kink”. A listener inquired if she and Allen’s podcast co host, Miquita, has ever “kink-shamed” anybody. The 39-year-old singer and actress addresses that she “was very, very promiscuous and experimental,” adding that she “had sex with female sex workers”. So, she is “quite into normalizing everything that people are ashamed about in themselves.”
But then she took a step back, and shared a bit about her relationship with her 49-year-old American actor husband. “I wonder if I kink-shame my husband. Because he quite often asks for things, and I’m like: ‘No, babe, it’s not happening.’
Allen clarifies that she doesn’t just tell him off. “I’m not like: ‘You piece of shit, how dare you ask me to do that!’” she then joked. “I’m just like: ‘Hmm, headache. Little headache, got a bit of a headache — maybe not tonight.’” She also notes that ultimately, her sobriety is a probable factor as to why she is not as promiscuous as she once was.
“I think alcohol had quite a lot to do with the kink for me,” she shared. “Before I got with David, I don’t think I’d ever had sex not drunk.”
“It was quite a lot of times when I was doing things I didn’t necessarily want to be doing,” she recalled. “But I’m a people-pleaser, and I have a deep-rooted fear of abandonment. So, I felt like if I don’t play the game, then I’m going to be abandoned and rejected.”
For the five-year sober singer, she credits her sobriety with helping her change many aspects of her life for the better. She and her ex-husband, Sam Cooper, finalized their divorce in 2018 and share two kids: Ethel and Marnie. In April, she told Glamour UK, “I don’t think I’d be married to my husband [Harbour]… I don’t think that my kids would be thriving in the way that they are. I don’t think that I’d have gone into finding acting and how much I enjoy that.”
“I actually don’t even know if I’d be alive if I’m honest if I hadn’t got sober. At the top of my gratitude list when I go to bed every night is my sobriety.”