Like all great romances, Lady Gaga and fiancé Michael Polansky’s began thanks to a mother who, as it turns out, actually did know best.
As the singer-actor revealed in a cover story for Vogue‘s October issue published Thursday, Gaga’s mother, Cynthia Germanotta, who runs the Born This Way Foundation, met Polansky, the CEO of the Parker Foundation (Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook fame’s charitable organization), and thought he’d make a great match for her daughter.
“My mom met him and she said to me, ‘I think I just met your husband,’” Gaga divulged. “And I said, ‘I’m not ready to meet my husband!’ I could never have imagined that my mom…found the most perfect person for me?”
And in December 2019, ready or not, Gaga and Polansky met at Parker’s 40th birthday party.
“I got invited and I said, ‘I wonder if Michael is going to be there,’ and my mom said yes, and so I went to the party and I kept asking for him and he finally came over to me and we talked for three hours. We had the most amazing conversation.”
That conversation led to more conversations, which led to falling in love. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and lockdowns forced the world inside, Gaga and Polansky headed to Malibu together. That year-ish period early in their relationship is something that Polansky called “this amazing chapter of a weird kind of normalcy,” and Gaga considered “really kind of special.”
“I’d been so focused on my career since I was a teenager. And the gift of that time was that I got to completely focus on my relationship,” she said. “I met this totally supportive, loving human being who wanted to get to know me—outside of Lady Gaga.”
After five years of dating, the two got engaged in April while rock climbing. “The missing piece in my life was having real love,” she said.
She described Polansky as “very private,” “so smart and so kind,” and, most importantly, on the same page. She thanks Polansky for encouraging her to make another pop album, and for being “a real friend who saw the ways in which I was unhappy and why.”
“I think what I want my fans to know is that I’m just, like, so happy,” she said. “I’m healthy. I feel like the last time they heard from me—in this way—was Chromatica, and that album was about an absolutely horrible time for me with my mental health. I was in a really dark place. I struggled for, like, many years before that. But everything started to change.”
Gaga has been engaged twice before, to actor Taylor Kinney and later to talent agent Christian Carino. Now, thanks to dear old mom, she thinks she’s found the real thing.
“I kind of thought I was going to have to do this all by myself—forever,” she said. “And that was really scary. Because it’s a big life.”
But now? “I don’t have to do this alone anymore.”