Shakira Says Watching Her Family “Dissolve” Was Her Darkest Moment — Four Years Later, She’s Found Something She Didn’t Expect

There is a version of this story that is easy to tell. Famous woman, famous man, very public breakup, very public music about it. The songs charted. The memes spread. The internet moved on.

Shakira did not.

In a new interview with The Times published May 22, the 49-year-old Grammy winner described the moment her relationship with Gerard Piqué ended as the darkest period of her life — "when I saw the dissolution of my family, the family that I had dreamt to keep forever."

That phrase — the dissolution of my family — is worth sitting with. Not "my relationship ended." Not "we broke up." A family she had built, and dreamed of keeping, came apart. That is a different kind of grief.

What made it harder was the timing. Shakira's father had flown to Barcelona to be with her after the split. While he was there, he suffered a severe fall. She found out through the press that she had been betrayed — while her father was in the ICU. Everything, as she later put it, happened at once.

"I've been through so much pain," she said, "but it has made me perhaps in an unforeseen way a wiser person — or stronger, at least."

What she found on the other side of that pain was not bitterness. That is the part of this interview that is easy to skip past and shouldn't be.

Four years after the split, Shakira spoke about her former partner without a trace of bitterness. "I will always have that gratitude in my heart for the father of my kids," she said, "and for turning me into the mother that I am today."

That sentence took work to get to. Not the kind of work that happens in a therapy session or a journal entry, but the kind that happens over years — in airports with two kids, in recording studios at two in the morning, in the middle of a world tour when the grief catches up with you anyway. She leaned on close friends including Chris Martin and Adele during the transition. She kept moving.

"Life sometimes can be difficult," she said, "but it's also beautiful and made of light and shadows. So I thank life for every single moment, the bright ones and the dark ones, the people who have made me suffer because they have become my masters who have taught me lessons, very valuable lessons."

On the subject of what comes next — a new relationship, a new chapter — she was plain.

"No romance for me for now," she said. "There's no space or time in my life for that. My plate is quite full. My kids are my priority. And my career. Strangely enough, I'm in love with my career like I've never been in my life."

She shares two sons, Milan, 13, and Sasha, 11, with Piqué. They are, by her own account, the organizing principle of her life right now. Not a consolation prize for what she lost. The point.

There is something in Shakira's account that goes beyond celebrity gossip and into something more universal — the experience of building a life around a particular future, and then having to rebuild when that future disappears. Most people who go through that don't have a world tour to throw themselves into. But the internal work — choosing gratitude over bitterness, choosing to keep going, choosing to be present for your children even when you are barely holding yourself together — that part is not exclusive to anyone famous.

"Sometimes through hardships and through pain is how we discover how strong we can be," she said.

She discovered it. It took four years. And she is still going.

Tags

Shakira, Gerard pique