In case you were wondering how Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes were spending time during the coronavirus outbreak, they’re social distancing together.
On Friday, March 20, The couple took to Instagram Live to perform for fans, joining the ranks of John Legend, Chris Martin, and Mandy Moore—all of whom have put on virtual shows to entertain the masses during this tough time. Cabello and Mendes sang some tunes for fans as part of Global Citizen’s “Together At Home” concert series, kicking off their set with a rendition of Ed Sheeran’s “Kiss Me”.
They also took questions from commenters and made some suggestions about how people should be spending time while we’re all stuck at home. “I think everybody should start Harry Potter from top to end,” Mendes said. “That’s the way to go.”
“We started watching it yesterday. I knew everything about it, of course,” Cabello joked before admitting, “I didn’t really know much. He knows a lot about it.” This led to a conversation about which Hogwarts house they think the other would be assigned to. Mendes told his girlfriend he believed she would absolutely be Gryffindor. “Really? That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she replied and revealed she thinks he would be assigned to the same house by the sorting hat.
The couple performed for about 24 minutes and did a number of their hits like “Havana”, “Lost in Japan”, and, of course, “Senorita.”
Cabello and Mendes have been friends for years, but only got romantically involved last year. “It’s so funny because when we first started going out it’s so weird… [dating] somebody who was your friend for a really long time,” Cabello told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show back in December. “The people around you already know them because you’ve known them for a long time, so it’s just like, ‘Now we kiss and hold hands.'”
Four-time Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Shawn Johnson East—like so many women—has incredibly high expectations of herself. So when the delivery of her daughter Drew Hazel didn’t go as she’d planned, she felt like she’d failed in her first moments of motherhood. “I went in with such a stubborn mindset of thinking the only way I could bring our baby into the world was naturally. No meds no intervention. At 14 hours when I chose to get an epidural, I felt guilty. At 22 hours when we were told I had to get a C-section, I felt like I had failed,” she wrote on Instagram. Here, Johnson East opens up to Glamour about the complicated world of social media moms, wrestling with mom guilt, and what it means to be a strong mother.
As an athlete, I had one mentality: you have to be strong, not weak. I was never one to take pain medication, worried it might affect my performance or somehow make me less of an elite athlete. Fast forward to motherhood, and those same attitudes applied. I muscled through the aches and pains of pregnancy, never wanting to be ‘that complaining pregnant woman,’ and planned to have a natural birth—it was my body against the pain. It was my first real mom decision and I felt like the safest option for my baby was going natural. That’s what I thought it meant to be a strong mother.
Things did not go as planned. Fourteen hours into labor, I asked for an epidural. By 22 hours, I was being taken for a C-section.
It my first wave of mom guilt. I felt like I’d caved, like I was selfish for getting the epidural. I wondered, Am I already making a poor decision for my child? I felt guilty, like I wasn’t doing this for my daughter but as a selfish reaction to the pain. And when doctors told me I’d need a C-section, I felt like this beautiful dream I’d had as a first-time mom to do the best thing for my child had failed. I know that C-sections are relatively safe procedures—safer than delivering vaginally in some cases—but I couldn’t stop thinking, What if something goes wrong because I selfishly decided to do this? I felt like I had failed her already.
There’s so much pressure on moms to be perfect. We tell moms that they have to be perfect otherwise they’re going to scar their child, raise them the wrong way, and leave them with issues that will be all mom’s fault. Sometimes it feels like no matter what decision you make, it’s the wrong one. In the hospital, I had this painful doubt: Am I already doing something wrong for my baby?
People on social media have a lot to say about this. We all know the mommy shamers—I’ve already been asked how dare I not breastfeed—people with such passionate opinions and an appetite for confrontation. It can breed a very negative mindset that you’re doing everything wrong for your child. But there’s another side to social media that offers so much support and makes moms not some idealized figures but human.
I know this from personal experience. Three years ago, my husband and I shared our miscarriage on social media—it was such a random leap of faith but opening up about that pain was really the only thing that got me through it. Thousands of women reached out with their own stories and it showed me a whole community that I didn’t really see before. It made me feel so much less alone.
After 22 hours of labor ending in a C-section, our daughter Drew Hazel East was born happy and healthy. After we brought her home, I thought about how healing it felt to share my miscarriage and decided to open up about feeling like a failure for having a C-section. I still had doubts about the whole thing—Should I feel guilty? Did I do the right thing? Seeing messages like “I went through the same thing and I felt the same way,” was so reassuring. I stopped feeling like a failure as a mom and felt human again.
When we’d shared our miscarriage story, I felt this frustration: Why aren’t these feelings of insecurity and shame talked about more? Why do women feel like they have to keep it hidden? I think the same thing goes for having a kid—people make every topic so dramatic, so controversial, and so political. You’re a natural birth mom or an elective C-section mom. A breastfeeding mom or a formula mom. A stay-at-home mom or a working mom. There are so many topics that just alienate you from the world immediately.
I think that’s the wrong approach. The moment I got to hold my daughter for the first time, I literally could have laughed at myself and everything that I cared about before that moment. For me to have cared so much about what it would mean if I had an epidural was crazy—I’d brought my daughter into the world happy and healthy. And that was all that mattered in my first moments as a mom.
Now I think being strong as a mom is learning how to go with the flow. You can have your plans and you can have your preferences about what’s best, but at the end of the day it’s about you and your child figuring things out together. Being strong as a mom isn’t sticking to a plan, it’s figuring it out and wrestling through it. It’s about being able to hold your baby and say, “Okay, we made it one step closer to whatever the goal is.” And being okay with however you get there.
Shawn Johnson East is an Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast, YouTuber and mom. Follow her at @shawnjohnson.
While there are some naysayers online who think it’s all about publicity, the two singers appear to being going strong after a sexy performance at the MTV VMAs and some well-documented PDA. Now, fans are analyzing every move they make and lyric they sing to try to learn more about the relationship they call #Shawmila.
But how did we get here? Let’s take a look back at how it all began.
July 2014: Cabello (as a member of Fifth Harmony) and Mendes meet while they are both opening acts for Austin Mahone’s tour. The singers recently discussed that time with V Magazine. “I remember thinking we met on the Austin Mahone tour, and I remember I wanted to hang out with you, but you were always on the tour bus, just learning guitar,” Cabello said. Mendes replied, “Yeah, that was me. I didn’t talk to anybody. You were the only person that talked to me. Like, you were the only one of everybody on that tour who would say words to me. Actually, I think if we go into our DM’s or something, there’s a photo from the day we met, I think.”
“And I thought you were out of your mind,” he continued. “I’d be in my bus where no one could see me. I’d be looking through the window and I’d see you, like, flying around on a scooter and jumping and doing cartwheels. I’d be like, she’s insane. Close the window and go to sleep.”
April 2015: Mendes plays a game of “Lips, Wife, or Leave It” and opts for Cabello as the “wife” over Chloe Grace Moretz and Jade Thirwall from Little Mix. “Yeah, she rocks,” he said.
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November 2015: Cabello and Mendes drop a song called “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which sparks dating rumors. “We were just backstage hanging out,” Mendes told Rolling Stone of how they wrote the song while on Taylor Swift’s 1989 tour. “I pulled out my guitar and we were just messing around, not really thinking about writing a song.”
Mendes and Cabello perform at the 2015 Jingle Ball in LA.Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes have been the epitome of summer romance ever since July, when rumors swirled that they were more than just friends and collaborators on the duet “Señorita.”
It’s easy to understand how that transition happened if you watch the single’s steamy music video, in which they can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. And in a recent red carpet interview with E! News at the Elle Women in Music event during New York Fashion Week, Cabello revealed that their smash hit is in fact what brought them romantically together.
“We went back and forth for eight months deciding whether or not we were going to do the song together,” Cabello said. At the time, she says she and Mendes had “drifted” apart and weren’t spending much time together.
“I love him with all my heart and always have,” she continued. “We’ve known each other for a really long time… We’ve always been there for each other. I think we drifted because we weren’t hanging out as much. It was fun to be able to reconnect and hang out again.”
Plus, being in love isn’t exactly the worst thing for Cabello’s creative process. It’s helped the former Fifth Harmony singer get more in touch with her emotions especially when it comes to music. “Falling in love, for me, just brings out all of my vulnerabilities,” she said. “All these things show up for me and it just makes you open. When I am in love I listen to songs and I just cry. I cry easier. That must mean that I’m more open and more in touch with my emotions. All the spectrum of emotions… joy, fear, all of it.”
It’s safe to say the couple is better than ever. Just last night, Cabello surprised the audience at Mendes’ concert in his hometown of Toronto, Canada to perform”Señorita.”
Camila Cabello is one of ELLE‘s cover stars this month for its Women in Music issue, and in her interview she discussed all those rumors about her and Shawn Mendes. “Love is the most sacred, precious thing to me,” she said. ” I want to always feel like my love is between me and that person, and never belonging to anyone else. As much as I love my fans, and as much as I love people, I like to live my life as normally as possible. In a relationship, it makes me feel uncomfortable to invite everyone in on that.”
When asked specifically about Mendes, Cabello said, “I don’t know; people can say whatever they want to say. They can speculate, but at the same time, we are going to live our own lives, enjoy it, and fall for each other like nobody is watching. That is how I want to live. I never want to open the door for people to feel like they are involved. Like I said, I want it to be mine and [his]. That’s why I’m so tight-lipped about it: because I want to protect it.”
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If you haven’t been keeping track of this situation, the internet is convinced Cabello and Mendes are a couple. Their steamy collaboration, “Señorita,” first sparked the discussion, followed by a string of PDA moments. Toss in a super-hot VMAs performance (watch above), and you have a full-blown pop-culture phenomenon.
Mendes actually confirmed he’s in a relationship earlier this week, though he didn’t explicitly say who with. It seems like anyone who wants a closer look at what’s going on will have to wait for Camila Cabello’s upcoming album: “I feel an undeniable truth that the album has captured the essence of me at this point in my life,” she also told Elle. We can’t wait to listen.
For the past six months, we’ve been watching Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello get flirty on Instagram, kiss in public, and basically steam up the stage anytime they perform “Senorita” together. There have been many whispers of coupledom but nary a confirmation from the two, despite mounting evidence. That is until this weekend, when Mendes, during a concert in Connecticut last week, decided to confirm whether or not there was a capital-T Thing going on in his life.
During his tour, a fan asked Mendes about a fateful sentence the singer had once said. About two years ago, Mendes had declared he’d never been in love. In an interview with Clash published in September 2017, the singer had said that he thought his music might change when he finally fell in love: “The day I can actually write a song about my girlfriend who I am truly in love with—because I’ve never actually truly been in love, I don’t know what type of music’s going to come out of me when I am. That might be a whole new wave of music that I never thought I could write,” he told the magazine.
Now, with all the rumors about Mendes and Cabello swirling, the fan apparently wanted to know where things might stand—but posed the question in a pretty tactful way. “You’ve said you’ve never been in love. Has that changed recently?” the fan asked Mendes, according to ET Canada.
“Honestly, I wanna say I wanna talk to you guys about this stuff, but it’s not just me in the relationship,” Mendes answered, equally tactfully. “There’s another person involved, and I can’t say things that I feel. It’s not just me deciding, you know?”
Of course, Mendes doesn’t name any names here, so we still have to take it with a grain of salt. But he’s in a relationship, which is something that was not confirmed until now. Until we hear more, we’ll just leave the brand-new video of Camila Cabello ruminating on the nature of love here.
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