In a recent interview, Shawn Mendes didn’t shy away from getting vulnerable. When asked about a fight with his girlfriend, Camila Cabello, he revealed the conflict made him reevaluate his most deeply-rooted fear: that he was capable of evil.
During his appearance on Man Enough‘s podcast, Mendes recounted the experience: “I raised my voice at her, and she was like, ‘I don’t like it when you raise your voice. Why did you raise your voice?’ And I got so defensive.”
“I was like, ‘I wasn’t raising my voice at you,’” he continued. “And I did raise my voice at her. And I felt her shrink, and I felt me grow, and I was like, ‘Oh god, this is the worst.’ I’m so terrified of being evil. I’m so scared to be bad. I don’t want to be bad.”
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Mendes said that the realization prompted him and Cabello “to get in this massive conversation” about what it meant for him and them as a couple.
“Maybe there even is bad inside of me, and I have to just accept that,” he said, via E!. “And that other part of me, he’s just got to be here, and we’ve just got to work together until eventually he gets worked in all of the trauma and all of the kinks get rubbed out of him, and he’s okay. But I can’t avoid the fact that there’s a little bit of darkness inside of me and letting that darkness kind of be present is a horrible feeling.”
Mendes admitted that he didn’t correct his behavior initially; instead, Cabello comforted him, then he ultimately apologized to her.
“I made it about my evil and my fear, and she comforted me,” he said. “And then it took me like 20 minutes of us separately reading our books to be able to come back to her and be like, ‘God, that was a whole thing and I’m really sorry.’” He added, via Entertainment Tonight, that he was working on “shortening that gap” between the incident and the apology. “You think you’re being vulnerable but, really, you’re just defending yourself even better.”
Mendes and Cabello will celebrate their two-year anniversary on July 4.
Alyssa Bailey
News and Strategy Editor
Alyssa Bailey is the news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton).
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