Ethel Cain Met Her Boyfriend at Her Favorite Truck Stop and He Was Her Type

When Ethel Cain met her boyfriend, he was just her type.

In a cover story interview with Cosmopolitan published on Wednesday, Oct. 1, the singer opened up about falling in love for the first time.

“My current boyfriend is the only man I’ve ever actually been with,” the 27-year-old singer, whose real name is Hayden Silas Anhedönia, said. “We met at my favorite truck stop. I used to hang out there in high school. He’s from Mississippi and he doesn’t really come to Florida that often so it was very weird that he was there.”

When they met, her boyfriend — whose identity she is yet to confirm — didn’t recognize her. However, he did know her music.

“I was covered from head to toe because it was the middle of December. But he was like, ‘Yeah, I just thought you were pretty, I wanted to come up and say hi.’ I knew immediately that I liked him — he’s very physically my type,” she said.

She added, “Bald guys. I love bald, weirdo, masculine, white trashy dudes. That’s just like everybody in my hometown, that’s what I’m used to.”

The “American Teenager” singer insisted that he’s “not just your typical country boy” and she could tell he was “weird in the same way I was weird.”

“His dad was a preacher, he’s a trucker. We both have been through a lot and are coming out of a very strange tumultuous time in our lives,” she said. “I don’t know what it was, but I felt a way about him I’d never felt about anybody. I thought, Oh, f–, this is it.”

Now, Cain said that “falling in love” has given her a “new outlook on life.”

“I’m like, ‘I want to be alive because I want as much time with you as possible.’ I have a journal that I bought, a separate journal just to specifically write about my boyfriend. And in the very first page, I just wrote, ‘I hope the world doesn’t end soon. I would like more time with my boyfriend,'” she said.

In July, Cain revealed to The Guardian that she was in her first-ever relationship — and as she worked on her most recent album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, old anxieties came back.

“Love was always my final frontier,” she said. “I never explored it. I never processed anything. I never progressed past the idea of love that I had as a teenager.”

“I see Ethel Cain as a piece of me that I separate from myself and discard, so that I can make good decisions in life,” she continued. “If Preacher’s Daughter was my learning experience of what not to do with trauma and healing, Willoughby Tucker has been my experience of what not to do in love.”