It’s going to take a lot more than one New York Times op-ed to turn Lady Gaga‘s new relationship into what she would label a bad romance.
Sure, it was a little odd to see boyfriend Michael Polansky‘s editor ex-girlfriend spouting off about their now decade-old union and how strange it is to watch him move on with someone far more entrenched in the public sphere. But that bit of ancient history wasn’t about to throw a woman as determined and accomplished as Lady Gaga off her game.
Just hours later she was releasing her “Stupid Love” music video as planned—the single marking her first solo effort in three years.
Because, let’s be clear, all she ever wanted was love. And she just may have found it in tech investor Polansky. On the heels of broken engagements to actor Taylor Kinney, 38, and talent agent Christian Carino, a source says the 33-year-old has met her perfectly complementary match in the CEO of Parker Foundation, a $600 million philanthropic effort he launched with Facebook cofounder Sean Parker.
“She’s really into him!” a source tells E! News of the 11-time Grammy winner. She and the applied mathematics and computer science graduate, also on the board of San Francisco’s Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, “are opposites of each other, which all-around is a good thing for her.” And while the source notes that Polansky is as successful as he is smart—practically a must for someone wanting to stand toe-to-platformed toe with one of the world’s best-selling music artists—most importantly, “He definitely cares a lot about Gaga.”
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Because the multi-platinum artist has had just about enough of throwing herself into the deep end of relationships that haven’t panned out. “I think women love very hard,” she said on CBS Sunday Morning in 2016. “We love men. We just love with everything we have. And sometimes I don’t know that that love is met with the type of dignity that we wish it would be met with.”
Her latest split, from audio mixer Dan Horton, seemed to have left her feeling wistful enough to post from makeup artist Sarah Nicole Tanno‘s bachelorette party, “An about to be a married woman and me, a single lady.” (And for the last time she and A Star Is Born costar Bradley Cooper were never more than two skilled actors who got the whole world truly buying into their onscreen romance. “I mean, we made a love story. For me, as a performer and as an actress, of course we wanted people to believe that we were in love,” she told Elle‘s December issue.)
So she was game when mutual friends suggested pairing her up with the 2006 Harvard graduate ahead of the holiday season. (A likely meeting spot: Parker’s December birthday party in L.A., though a source noted to Page Six, they could have met at any number of events the Facebook vet has held at his $55 million, nine-bedroom spread.)
Though the couple had hoped to keep things just between them, they inadvertently took their romance public on New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas (where Gaga has two concurrent residencies), their midnight kiss captured and transferred all over the web.
It wasn’t until the “Shallow” artist was tapped to perform at a Super Bowl pre-party in Miami, though, that they decided to rip the veil off. Because of course he was going to tag along to Florida, the two rarely venturing somewhere without the other these days. “They’ve been out and about in Los Angeles,” an insider told E! News in early February, “and spending a lot of time at her house. She’s taking him everywhere she goes and they don’t want to be apart.”
Nor were they all that interested in playing coy any longer.
“They weren’t shy about showing off PDA,” a source, who spotted the two sharing a kiss on the balcony of her rented mansion ahead of her performance at the AT&T TV Super Saturday Night Concert, told People. “They seemed very happy together.”
Sunday saw them leaving Hard Rock Stadium hand-in-hand, having watched the Kansas City Chiefs handle the San Francisco 49ers. And should that not make things clear enough, Gaga shared an awfully cozy photo to Instagram that seemed to officially cement their status—perching on a guy’s lap not tending to scream “just pals” and all.
“We had so much fun in Miami,” she captioned the snap, no doubt taken during a weekend yacht excursion. “Love to all my little monsters and fans, you’re the best!”
Her new guy, though, he’s pretty great as well. A handful of months in, he seems to have already won over the parents, having been spotted gamely chatting with her mom Cynthia Germonotta during her Super Bowl show.
To hear those in the know talk about him, he’s just the kind of suitor your parents would want you to bring home. “Michael is a really smart guy, a very serious guy, who has always been low key,” one source told Page Six. And thanks to his editor ex, Lindsay Crouse, we know he can commit, the writer detailing the seven-year relationship that encapsulated much of their early twenties.
Most crucially, as the insider told E! News, Gaga is “crazy about him.”
Having already slid neatly into the Oscar winner’s world, there’s a solid chance he’s here to stay, which would dovetail quite nicely with her 10-year plan. Asked what she’d like to accomplish in the next decade during a December chat with YouTube star Nikkie Tutorials, the Haus Laboratories creator, replied, “I wanna do more movies, I wanna have babies and I want to continue to build the behemoth that is Haus Laboratories into the makeup company of my dreams.”
You caught the babies part, right?
Her M.O. has always been to go full-throttle. “When I get inspired, I do things right away,” she continued. “There will be tons of crazy things that I do over the next decade. I just don’t know exactly what they are, which is why they’ll be extra crazy.”
And in the grand scheme of meat dresses, giant egg shuttles and entire outfits made out of stuffed frogs is falling into a forever kind of love really all that far-fetched?