Adele Recalls the Moment She Knew Her Marriage to Simon Konecki Was Over

Adele remembered vividly how she knew her marriage to ex-husband Simon Konecki was over during a candid interview with Oprah Winfrey in Sunday’s CBS special Adele One Night Only. The Grammy winner, who is preparing to release her album 30 about the end of her eight-year relationship in 2019, told Winfrey she was determined to make her marriage work for their 9-year-old son Angelo.

“I’ve been obsessed with the nuclear family my whole life because I never came from one. In all these movies and all these books, when you grow up reading them, that’s what it should be,” she shared. “I just, from a very young age, promised myself that when I had kids, that we’d stay together. We would be that united family. And I tried for a really, really long time.” 

Looking back at her brief marriage to Konecki, whom she officially wed in 2018, Adele recalled the exact moment she knew they were finished. Looking at questions in a magazine with friends, Adele was asked to share something no one would ever know about her. “And I just said it in front of three of my friends, I was like, ‘I’m really not happy,’” she remembered. “‘I’m not living, I’m just plodding along.’”

Remembering her lyric “‘I want to live and not just survive,” from her album 25, Adele said she admitted to her friends who thought she was happy that she was actually “really unhappy,” which set them “aghast.” She continued, “I felt like it was sort of from there that I was like, ‘What am I doing it for?’” The “Hello” singer was “so disappointed” for her son when she realized her marriage to his father was ending. “I was so disappointed for myself, and I thought I was gonna be the one that stopped doing those bloody patterns all the time,” she continued.

Even after the end of their marriage, Adele had no regrets when it came to her relationship with Konecki, whom she called “the most stable person” she had ever had in her life at that point. “He came at such a moment, where the stability that he and Angelo have given me, no one else would have ever been able to give me,” she said. “Especially at that time in my life. I could’ve easily gone down some dodgy paths, [or been] sort of self-destructive from being so overwhelmed by all of it.” Even now, Adele said Konecki is one of the people she can trust with her life, adding, “I feel like him and Angelo were angels sent to me.”