Actress and singer Amber Riley has moved on from her engagement to DeSean Black.
While visiting the podcast Nice & Neat last month, the Single Black Female star was asked about her relationship status, to which she replied, “I am a single Black female. I am, but I’m not a crazy one like in the movie.”
That revelation may have come as a surprise to some, who knew she was engaged to Black and had been since 2020.
“I’m recently single,” she added, noting that the breakup wasn’t a nasty one.
“It was amicable,” she said. “I wish him the best. I don’t have anything horrible or bad to say.”
Riley initially announced she was engaged in the fall of 2020.
“There was a time when I thought I didn’t want or deserve this kind of love. I’m looking at a man who changed my mind,” she wrote in a since deleted Instagram post. “My time by myself, loving on myself, getting comfortable with myself, prepared me for you, and prepared me for this.”
The couple quickly became a favorite online, with Riley opening up about their initial connection coming from her sliding in Black’s DMs, and them opening up about their love in Netflix’s online series Love That For Us in 2021. They were last seen together publicly at the premiere of her hit Lifetime movie Single Black Female in late January.
She didn’t say anything else in regards to that split, but when asked about any relationship regrets in her life, she said she had none.
“I learned lessons from every relationship I was in and I thank them and leave them with love and light. That’s all that I can do,” she said. “It’s not a passive aggressive ‘love and light’ because honestly, the only thing that I can control is me. And that’s the only thing I can focus on. I can only focus on my mistakes and what it is that I’ve done and how I’m going to do better. If I sit and think about every single thing that person may have done…for what?”
Riley’s focus these days is on herself, and choosing herself, as she told the Nice & Neat hosts. If you follow the star, you’ll see she’s been going hard in the gym as part of her dedication to prioritizing wellness not necessarily for the physical benefits, but really, for the mental gains.
“It’s taken me a couple years to understand that choosing myself is not selfish,” she said. It sounds foreign and it sounds inappropriate and it [sounded] wrong to me for a long time. But making those decisions to actively choose yourself has really helped me say, ‘Oh God I really don’t feel like getting up that early tomorrow to work out but I have this, this and this to do in the afternoon and I need to get my mind right.’ And that is, ‘Amber, you choosing yourself.'”
Here’s to choosing yourself and moving on from things in a peaceful, positive way.