Shawn Mendes reveals how Camila Cabello’s body positivity impacted him

Shawn Mendes got personal about his relationship with girlfriend Camila Cabello in a new GQ interview. 

The 22-year-old musician gave fans a relatively unfettered look at his life in his new Netflix film In Wonder and continues to share in the magazine’s January/February 2021 issue. 

Getting candid about Cabello, 23, and the media scrutiny she and her body have endured over the years, Mendes said her response to criticism has ‘really changed my life.’ 

Praising Cabello for being, ‘so strong, so clear and confident with her [body] and so articulate and empathetic about other people’s,’ he said that spending time around her has ‘really changed my view of mine,’ acknowledging that she faces a level of inspection as a female that is ten time worse than his. 

‘Some days I would have three hours of sleep, [because] I’d get up two hours early just to be able to work out’, he said as he held himself to an incredibly high Hollywood standard and an internal voice that told him, ‘If you don’t work out, you’re going to lose fans.’

‘You are not your body. You are not your voice. You are not your songs. You are you and people love you because of you,’ his family and friends would tell him though it sometimes fell on deaf ears.  

His perspective on his body continued to be magnified after landing a Calvin Klein campaign and he started to connect being a ‘pinnacle of fitness,’ with his identity, adding that ultimately he has learned, that ‘taking that extra few hours of sleep, instead of waking up to pump iron, is a better choice sometimes.’ 

Cabello – who has been a long time inspiration in his music over the years, as he has said that all of his songs are about her – has also learned a lot from dating Shawn. 

‘It’s not just the happy blissful moments you see in pictures and videos – when you’re in a relationship with someone, it feels like they are this mirror reflecting yourself back to you – I constantly have to confront my fears, my anxieties, my insecurities, my patterns of thinking, my beliefs about life and about myself,’ she said in an Instagram post. 

Speaking to VMan Magazine, Shawn praised his Senorita collaborator for being a ‘calming presence in his life,’ and making him more in tune with his family and friends.

‘When I landed with Camila, immediately she had her family around more. [She’s] all about the family and friends, and it really made me like, “Oh, I should call my mom” … I felt a little bit alone out there and she changed that for me,’ he said. 

While the pandemic has undoubtedly been tough for everyone, he has said that he has been able to find a level of normalcy that comes from hanging out with Cabello and her family in Miami for a majority of lockdown. 

‘I [was able to] have a routine, watch a movie nightly with family, do the dishes, stuff that sounds pretty mundane, but actually … when you’re living in a hotel room, you never do laundry,’ he said adding in an Apple Music interview that he ‘loves the smell’ of laundry. 

He continued to say that having this time to breathe amid his usual hectic life that included 105 shows on tour last year, really helped him recalibrate and he praised meditation and journaling as necessary outlets for his emotions and self-reflection. 

Despite this he shared that he has felt pressure while coming up as an artist to maintain a squeaky clean image, despite often liking to have fun with his friends like a normal young adult who started a career at a very early age. 

‘I held myself accountable to that image of not doing anything wrong, or saying anything wrong, so hard over the last few years,’ he said adding, ‘It’s not that that’s got me here. But it is a part of where I am.’

In addition he has shared that his approach to writing music for his new album Wonder was founded in an ability to let go and give himself grace about not always knowing what was going to come out of his brain or mouth, and not making music for other people. 

‘To make art in order to have people like it and purchase it becomes a very stressful and hard thing,’ he said calling his former process, ‘a sh***y way to make art.’