Lena Dunham reveals she was briefly engaged to another man after breakup with Jack Antonoff
Lena Dunham attends the "Veep" season 7 premiere at Lincoln Center on March 26, 2019, in Manhattan. Credit: Getty Images / Dimitrios Kambouris
"Girls" creator-star Lena Dunham says that after her high-profile breakup with longtime boyfriend Jack Antonoff in 2018, she was briefly engaged to another man but now has been single for more than a year.
"I'd just had a hysterectomy, I'd broken up with my boyfriend, I was in the process of breaking up with my business partner — I had no business buying a pair of shoes, [let alone] getting engaged," Dunham, 33, says in the new issue of Cosmopolitan magazine's U.K. edition. Without naming the man, she described him proposing with the lace of a Timberland boot while they were snowed in at her parents' apartment.
"Then I just went, 'You know what? I've been dating since I was 15 years old. I'm allowed to take a break" the writer-producer continues. Referring to her past addiction to prescription anxiety medications, she adds, "Sobriety for me means so much more than just not doing drugs, it also means that I abstain from negative relationships. It means I've taken a hiatus from dating, which has been amazing for me."
Dunham — a Golden Globe winner and eight-time Emmy Award nominee for HBO's 2012-2017 seriocomedy "Girls" — previously had been in a relationship with Grammy-winning pop-rocker and producer Antonoff, 35, for roughly five-and-a-half-years. "We fell in love when I was really young," she says. "I was 25. I look back and we had a great ride, we cared for each other, but you know what? We were both starting our careers and that was our true passion."
She adds, "The love you have for someone doesn't disappear because you don't have them; it's just logistically it doesn't work any more." Calling Antonoff "a dear, dear friend of mine," Dunham says, "What's really nice is we don't try to pretend that we don't have this history together, but we're also willing to move forward."
Dunham has been in London and in Cardiff, Wales, serving as an executive producer and directing the first episode of the upcoming BBC-HBO finance-drama series "Industry."
