Cheryl Cole looks gorgeous on Glamour’s UK December 2020 cover. Inside, the lovely 29-year-old songstress sits down for a chat with the magazine and dishes on a wide range of topics including her divorce, love and marriage, but also paparazzi, career, and her autobiography, ‘Cheryl: My Story’, that is about to be published. “I got offered a book deal two years ago but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind,” she says. “I’d gone through so much and wanted to keep it all inside. I was still in a lot of pain from the divorce and it wasn’t the right time. Then someone came out and said I’d had a relationship with them when I hadn’t – he just made it up. And suddenly I’d had enough. I’d had enough of other people’s sh*t on a daily basis. I picked up the phone and said, ‘I’ll do it,’” she says.
In 2020, Cheryl divorced Ashley Cole after four years of marriage due to the footballer’s infidelity. “You go through something like a divorce and nothing else matters in the world except that. At the time, I just thought: ‘I can’t carry on.’ I couldn’t understand why I had to go through all that public pressure when I was already going through the hardest thing in the world. To have the added stress of being scrutinised and criticised made it insanely hard,” the singer confesses in the interview.
On 3 July 2020, Cole was hospitalized with suspected acute malaria after a visit to Tanzania. “Remember those pictures of Britney being stretchered into hospital when she was having her breakdown? That was sick. There was this rumour that I didn’t really have malaria but anorexia. That was equally twisted, to me,” she says. “So when I found out there was a way to get an injunction against them [the paparazzi], it was the start of a big change. For the first time in so long, I felt human again. It was like the raincloud that had been over my head for years had suddenly gone and it was a sunny day,” Cheryl told Glamour.
The beautiful songstress considers that there should be a certain limit when it comes to paparazzi’s actions. “I get that I’m famous. I get that I’m going to have people taking photos of me when I don’t want them to. But there’s a line, and it has been more than crossed with me. It’s inhumane. I don’t belong to them,” Cole explains.
As on relationships, the starlet admits that things are complicated. “I’m the worst – a man has to be just right for me. Dating someone who’s not in the industry can be difficult, but dating someone in the limelight has its own problems. Everything is intensified. If I fell in love with a dustbin man, I’d be happy to be in love with a dustbin man, but if I fell in love with some really famous man, I feel like that would belong to the media.” “The weirdest thing is, it takes a long time after you’ve been with someone as long as I was [with Ashley] not to feel like you’re cheating on them. That may sound crazy, but it’s the way I left after him. I had completely committed myself,” the beautiful singer confessed in her interview.
Cheryl is now dating backing dancer Tre Holloway. “I was very innocent when I started out, and happy to talk about how amazing Ashley was and how much I loved him. I mean, I would read the odd headline and think, ‘Oh sh*t – maybe I was a bit too open,’ but I was always happy to talk about things. Since then, I’ve been to hell and back, and I’ve made a decision: I won’t ever talk about a relationship in public again,” Cole told the magazine.
What about getting married again? “Never say never,” she says. “I always said I wanted to have a big family, because I’m from one, so I’d like four or five children, but I don’t know realistically if that’s going to happen. You can assume things. I never thought I’d get a divorce.”
Cheryl feels happy and healthier than she was in a long time. “I first got very thin after Ashley. I felt like my stomach was doing backflips – like my emotions had taken over and made me full. I first experienced that when my granddad died and I couldn’t understand what was going on. I said to my grandmother, ‘The pasta just won’t go into my mouth,” the singer reveals in the interview with Glamour. “I work out a lot, but one week I might have a few nights in, eating pizza or any kind of junk food (and watching The X Factor, now that I’m not on it!), and put on a few pounds,” Cheryl says.
Read Cheryl Cole’s complete interview in the December 2020 issue of Glamour UK.
Photos courtesy of Glamour UK
