Emma Watson has offered a fresh perspective on love, and marriage, while also throwing it back to her earliest days on the set of Harry Potter.
Now 35, the actor sat down with Jay Shetty for a wide-ranging podcast interview where she revisited the now-famous term “self-partnered” and reflected on why she’s still happily unmarried.
Why she’s glad she didn’t marry sooner
Watson first introduced the concept of being “self-partnered” in 2019, explaining that she’d reached a place of contentment without a partner. The phrase went viral, prompting both praise and confusion online.
Speaking on Shetty’s podcast, she explained that the word came from a desire to describe a specific kind of pressure she felt in her late twenties.
“There was no word for this kind of subliminal messaging and anxiety and pressure that I felt building up but couldn't really name, so I used the word self-partnered,” she said.
She then admitted that if she’d married earlier in life, “it would’ve been carnage” for both her and her partner.
“I’m just so happy not to be divorced yet,” she said. “That sounds like a really negative answer but I think we’re being pressured and forced into this thing that I believe is a kind of miracle. I might never be worthy of it.”
She added: “I hope it happens to me but I don’t feel entitled to it. It will either be part of purpose here and my destiny or it won’t.”
Watson also pushed back on the idea that marriage should follow a deadline, saying: “The way we treat it as though ‘why haven’t you’ and ‘this is something that has to happen in this certain timespan’ is the least romantic thing I can think of.”
Looking back on her Harry Potter crush
Before her thoughts on adult relationships gained viral attention, Watson had already made headlines for a different kind of confession—one that fans of Harry Potter still remember well.
Speaking to Jonathan Ross in 2012, Watson revealed she had a “really terrible crush” on co-star Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the series.
“Between the ages of ten and twelve I had a really terrible crush on Tom Felton,” she said. “To the extent that I would go into work in the morning and look down the numbers on the call sheet to see if he was going to be in.”
She added: “We love a bad guy, he was a few years older and he had a skateboard—and that just did it really.”
Felton reportedly knew about the crush but saw her in more of a “younger, sisterly” way, which Watson admitted “just broke my heart. It still does.”
Despite the childhood heartbreak, the two remain close. Felton has spoken warmly about their friendship, even crediting Watson for encouraging him to open up more deeply in his 2022 memoir Beyond the Wand.