She has mastered the merry-go-round. Nicki Minaj opened up to Nylon in her April 2016 cover story about grappling with emotional instability following her highly publicized 2014 split from her boyfriend Safaree Samuels, which in many ways influenced her album that year, The Pinkprint.
“I needed time to hear myself think again,” Minaj, 33, said of the aftermath of the split. “Because where I left off with The Pinkprint was a little bit emotionally unstable … Now, I want my happiness to be reflected in the new stuff.”
The rapper and Samuels, 34, dated for 11 years before breaking things off two years ago; in between, the exes dealt with a very public fallout. In a January 2015 interview, Samuels detailed what exactly went wrong.
“I walked away. I’m not going to say I broke up, but I’m the one who walked away. I packed up my stuff and I left,” he told Power 105.1’s “The Breakfast Club.” “I just got to the point where the respect wasn’t there. Everyone around her works for her, you know? So it got to the point where it was like, I’m your man. I’m who you go to sleep with every night. I’m who you wake up with every morning. And it got to the point where I was being treated like an employee, instead of like her man.”
Meanwhile, Minaj projected her heartbreak through her music. These days, however, she’s much happier with her current boyfriend, Meek Mill.
“When he and I were just friends, he would always say, ‘You remind me of my mother, and I like that because you’re like a dude. You’re tough like a guy and you talk like a dude,’” the Barbershop: The Next actress said. “So I always got the sense that me being tough and bossy was a turn-on for him. And it’s important for me to keep my voice. Being in a relationship shouldn’t mean that you lose your voice. Being in a relationship should mean that you’ve met a secure-enough man to allow you, in a sense, to remain a queen.”
They’re also one step (well, ring) away from engagement. “I’m not engaged yet,” she told Nylon. “He said that my third ring would be my engagement ring. But sometimes he calls me his fiancée, and I’m always trying to stop him, like, ‘Nope! I ain’t got that third ring yet!’ We’re just taking it one step at a time.”
However, she longs to be a mom. “If I get married, then I’ll have a child,” Minaj reasoned to the mag. “And that’ll be fun, because I can’t wait to hold my baby.”
