Pat Benatar wasn’t lying when she sang, “Love Is A Battlefield.” Despite what the rom coms portray, falling in love isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. It requires hard work, honesty and dealing with your own traumas so you can heal and love properly. On the set of Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Facebook show Red Table Talk, Wale says that he’s ready to find real love, but is struggling to find “the one.”
This week, Wale was a guest alongside Jane The Virgin actor Justin Baldoni. During the conversation, he revealed that he’d had an epiphany while walking the romantic streets of Paris all by himself. “It’s me,” he admitted. “I’m gonna to try to really deal with the things I’ve messed up with and really try to figure it out.”
The “Lotus Flower Bomb” rapper then talks about how his personal experiences as an entertainer made him weary of opening his heart.”I got famous young in D.C., and I’ve seen how women were acting around me. And I think it’s shaped how I viewed women moving forward.”
“You’ve got to understand, you’re talking to a rapper,” he explains further. “All I see is promiscuous behavior. All I see is, oh my man play for this team and his wife cheated on him for somebody…I’m seeing this first hand. Then I fell head over heels for somebody in this industry, I seen how vicious it can be and how gutted I was. I was never really the same.”
Wale recently welcomed a daughter named Zyla with model Chloe Alexis. While he didn’t comment specifically about the status of his relationship with Chloe (the two appear to be broken up, according to Instagram), he does talk about how fleeting committed relationships can be for the famous. “In our industry, entertainment, everybody moves on so fast. We can’t even argue. Think about that. We argue, two days later, you in Greystone with a fourth string running back. So when you talk about girls…any conflict, they’re gone. You can’t even reconcile. You’re just on to the next one.”
Just when it seems Wale is losing hope for his future love life, his fellow panelists swoop in with some encouraging words. Jada, using her own experience with Will Smith, revealed that in order to find true happiness, you must first fall in love with yourself.
“I grew up in a single parent home, I didn’t see all the time healthy relationships,” she says. “I had to figure it out too. I came to the table with a lot of pain and a lot of brokenness. And most of all, I came to the table with some hardcore daddy issues. It made me really angry towards men. I had very high expectations. I was hard. I could’ve ended up with all kinds of dudes. The way I ended up with Will, I had to change my whole perspective, because I want you to know something, he was not the dude! But I had to change that. I can’t ask somebody to be for me, what I am not willing to be for them. And what I realized in my partnership with Will, was I was asking him to be a lot of things for me that I wasn’t willing to do for me.”
*Cue praise break*
Watch the full Red Table Talk interview with Wale below:
