After Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes dominated the summer charts with their mammoth hit “Señorita,” fans were eager to find any references of him on her sophomore album, Romance. After the album dropped on Dec. 6, listeners listened. With half of the album’s thirteen tracks already released – including the “Señorita” collaboration – some wondered if Camila saved the best for last? She would — literally. In “First Man,” the final song on Romance, Camila addresses her father – “the first man that really loved me” – while gushing over her new romance. “You’ll like him, he’s really kind/ And he’s funny like you sometimes,” she sings, hoping to get her daddy’s approval. “He makes me really happy/ I think he might be the one.”
Whereas Ariana Grande named an entire song about her then-lover Pete Davidson, the chances that Camila was going to name her boyfriend on any of her new music were very low. She doesn’t even really like to name Shawn when talking publicly about her romance. “I guess I was avoiding it, yeah,” she told the Sun-Sentinel while explaining why she kept the romance under wraps for as long as she did. “I mean, I don’t call him Shawn Mendes, you know? I call him pet names that I’m not gonna say in this interview. But I feel like when I say his name, it’s just contributing to the pop-culture circus.”
“As soon as I do it, I can hear the screams,” she added, “and I’m like, ‘No, no, no, you’re not hearing what I’m trying to say.’ I’m not talking about it as some Twitter thing. That’s my boyfriend. This is real.”
Shawn and Camila met in 2014, and collaborated on 2015’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” It was around that time that she “bonded with him as more than a friend,” she told Rolling Stone. “I think he did, too, but we were both really young, and he was experiencing the pressures of his career. I don’t think we knew what to do with those feelings. It was this awkward thing where we both liked each other, but we weren’t together. It was just weird. An energy was there from the beginning, but after that song, we didn’t spend as much time together. Our paths just didn’t cross in that way romantically until we started hanging out again and writing. For me, it just brought it back.”
Brought it back, it certainly did. As soon as “Señorita” dropped, there was speculation that these two were dating. It didn’t help that the music video was sizzling with their chemistry and well-rehearsed choreography. The two were spotted holding hands at the start of July, and shortly after that, they were spotted making out in a pool in Miami. With the cat out of the bag, the couple confirmed the romance in September (around the time of their MTV VMA performance of their massive hit.) And now, they have another song to celebrate their romance. Sweet.