Lily Allen is BBC Podcasts miss me?, And they aren’t hiding any of the more intimate or vulnerable details about the couple or themselves.
The conversation stemmed from the podcast’s episode theme of “sexual perversion.” A listener asked if she and Allen’s podcast co-host Mikita had ever “accused anyone of sexual perversion.” The 39-year-old singer and actress said she was “very, very promiscuous and experimental,” adding that she had “had sex with female sex workers.” In other words, she’s “pretty keen to normalize all the things that people are ashamed of about themselves.”
But then she took a step back and spoke at length about her relationship with her American actor husband, 49. “I wonder if I’m accusing my husband of sexual preference, because he often asks for something and I’m like, ‘No, baby, I’m not going to do that.’
Allen makes it clear that she’s not just going to chastise him. “I’m not like, ‘You son of a bitch, how dare you ask me to do that!'” she jokes. “I’m just like, ‘Uh, I’ve got a headache. I’ve got a little headache, I’ve got a little headache. I’ll skip it for tonight.'” She also points out that, after all, being sober is probably part of the reason she’s not as promiscuous as she used to be.
“I think my sexuality has a lot to do with alcohol,” she said. “Before David and I, I don’t think I’d ever had sex sober.”
“A lot of the time I was doing things that I didn’t necessarily want to do,” she recalls, “but I have a strong need to be liked and a deep-seated fear of abandonment, so I felt like if I didn’t play games I would be abandoned and rejected.”
The singer, who has been sober for five years, believes it has changed many aspects of her life for the better. She and ex-husband Sam Cooper divorced in 2018 and have two children, Ethel and Marnie. In April she said: Glamour UK“I don’t think I’ll ever marry my husband. [Harbour]… I don’t think my kids would have grown up the way they are now. I don’t think I would have ever thought I’d get into the acting world and find it so much fun.”
“To be honest with you, if I hadn’t gotten sober, I don’t even know if I’d be alive. Sobriety is at the top of my list of things I’m grateful for when I go to bed every night.”