Zayn Malik doesn't think he was ever "in love" with Gigi Hadid

Speaking on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Zayn said: "To be fair, just to have this on the record, I will always love G, because she is the reason my child is on this Earth and I have the utmost respect for her.

"I will always love her, but I don't know if I was in love with her.

"I do love her a crazy amount, but no, I don't think I was in love with her at that point.

"Otherwise I would have been a better version of myself."

At the time, the 33-year-old singer did believe he had genuine feelings for Gigi - who is in a relationship with Bradley Cooper - but now he doesn't think they ran as deeply as he thought.

He added: "My understanding of love is always developing. At that moment in time, I might have thought it was love, but as I got older I realized maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was lust. Maybe it was this, maybe it was that. I don't feel like it was love."

And Zayn - who dated Perrie Edwards from 2012 to 2015 - finds life as a single man to be "freeing".

He said: "I don't find being alone scary.

"No disrespect to all the past relationships I've been in. No disrespect at all, it was freeing. I am that type of person who runs on my own clock, answers to myself. So, it was so freeing to me. I could just do things, make plans. Sleep until any time I want.

"I tended to get in trouble in relationships, 'cause I was young, did certain things, spoke to other females when I shouldn't have been.

"You live and learn from it, but this way, there's no guilt."

The former One Direction singer has said before that he wasn't sure if he had ever been in love.

Speaking on The Zach Sang Show, he admitted: "I don't know if I've actually truly been in love at this point."