When Priyanka Chopra felt like a doormat in her past romances

Actor said she went from relationship to relationship without giving herself a much-needed break

Bollywood icon Priyanka Chopra has been making waves within India and on a global scale. The actor, who recently starred in two international projects, Amazon's spy thriller Citadel and a rom-com film, Love Again, opened up about her past relationships in an interview. 

In the latest episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, Priyanka, who married American popstar Nick Jonas in 2018, was asked if she had any pattern while choosing her romantic partner. The actor, while calling herself a ‘monogamist’, said, “I went from relationship to relationship to relationship. I did not give myself time at all between relationships, till my last one. I always ended up dating the actors that I worked with or the people that I met on my set."

The Baywatch star added, "I just thought I had an idea of what a relationship should be like, and I kept seeking that and trying to fit the people that came into my life into my idea of that relationship.”

However, before committing to Nick, Priyanka decided to prioritise herself and reflect on why she felt the need to be the caretaker [in a relationship]. "I always feel like it’s okay to cancel my job or my work or my meeting or my priority to make sure that he’s propped up," the actor said about keeping her partner's needs before hers. 

"It was so normalised in my brain for so long that I ended up giving the power in such a skewed way that I never stood up for myself. I literally would become like a doormat and I was like, okay, that’s fine because, you know, that’s what women have been told for such a long time that our role is to glue the family together or you’ve got to make your man feel comfortable when he comes back home,” shared Priyanka.

The former Miss World also put some of the blame on the “patriarchal society” that she comes from where she feels “there’s a normalcy around the man eating first and then women.”

But soon she realised what she was doing was “self-destructive” and started feeling ‘invisible’ in her relationships. Priyanka said, “I reached a point in my life where I was like, what are you doing? Like, this is getting self-destructive at this point when I had to choose me, I had to be like I don’t owe no one anything except my family and myself, the people who truly love me."

She further commented, "When you are in relationships where you stop recognising who you are, you stop having your own identity, or you stop knowing what is it what you want for yourself, what your goals are, then you are invisible. And, I just started feeling invisible in my relationships.”

However, she felt things changed when she saw met her now-husband, who thrives on seeing her shine. “My husband makes me feel so seen and so heard and in fact, he thrives on seeing me shine, like he is the most excited about the shows I am doing, he is the most excited when I am on a carpet, he will step aside and he will take pictures of me,” Priyanka shared while adding that Nick is everything a woman would want in her partner.

She concluded, “My husband and I have this incredible partnership of ‘I got you.’ I can lean on him, you know, that trust exercise, I won’t do that with anyone except Nick. I don’t trust people. He has my back.”

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