Gabourey Sidibe Talks Dating After Weight-Loss Surgery: ‘I Am Ready to Receive a Gentleman Caller!’
Gabourey Sidibe is single and ready to mingle!
In addition to opening up about her weight-loss surgery and journey to body-positivity, the Empire star gets real about her love life in her upcoming memoir — This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare — as well as in the new issue of PEOPLE.
“For the most part, I’m living my best life, but I would love to be dating,” the 33-year-old tells the magazine. “I am ready to receive a gentleman caller!”
Since moving to Los Angeles last spring, the Oscar-nominated actress took a break from dating, but now she’s ready to get back in the game.
“I looked around a good five months ago, and I realized: Every single person that I hang out with is either a gay man or a woman, and neither one of those people are gonna f— me. Or marry me. That’s the ultimate goal,” she says.
“I see straight men, so I opening myself up to that because this is how the universe works for me: The second I decide something, it just happens,” she continues. “I’ve been meetings so many straight men who are like my friends, and now I’m in the mood where I’m like, ‘All right, we’ve got to be more than friends.’ I want the universe to hear that! I want to be in a relationship, and I feel like I’d be doing myself a disservice if I don’t, so I do.”
And what would her perfect man look like? Tall, for starters — but not very tall.
“I’m 5’4, so if you are 5’6, I will consider you tall because you are taller than me,” Sidibe says. “If you’re 5′ 7/8, please apply also: I will climb you.”
More seriously though, the Precious star says she’s looking for a man with some ambition.
“I’m not very superficial. I like really funny guys, I like guys who are smart, I like people that read, I like people that have really interesting things to do, I like people that really enjoy their jobs,” she says. “I don’t want somebody who’s like constantly stressed and in a state of their life that they don’t want to be in — you’ve got to be upwardly mobile; that’s emotionally, spiritually, physically and monetarily. And I’m not necessarily into look. I’m more into personality.”
For more on Gabourey Sidibe and an exclusive excerpt from her new book This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.
In addition to chronicling the highs and lows of her dating life, the star also dishes on her “Hoe Phase” during her early twenties.
“I’m very, very grateful for this time in my life where I didn’t want to be in a relationship, but I also wanted somebody to look at me — somebody that I didn’t particularly care about. I just wanted to bump up against somebody, honestly,” says Sidibe.
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“Looking around at all of my friends, every single one of us has gone through that. We’re all normal, thriving, gorgeous, super-smart, dope-ass ladies, but we had to do it. I think that if I were like married to the first person that I banged or my first boyfriend — if I never had a Hoe Phase — I think that I would be wanting for it, even though I’m not married, and I’m super single, and I’m 33. I’m not regretting it, and I’m also not wanting to be a hoe again either.”
Adds the star: “I don’t want to be like, ‘It’s important that everyone go out and have a Hoe Phase!’ Don’t let me be the one to tell you how to live your life! And don’t blame any of your venereal diseases on me!”
