Rihanna opened up about her and boyfriend ASAP Rocky's love story and how a pandemic helped get the rapper finally get out of the friend zone.

The very pregnant pop star sat down for an interview with Vogue for the magazine's May 2022 cover, speaking freely about all of the new love in her life. She explained that the initial hurdle to her and Rocky getting together was just how much history they share. “People don’t get out of the friend zone very easily with me,” she said. “And I certainly took a while to get over how much I know him and how much he knows me, because we also know how much trouble we can land each other in.” But Rihanna says that things between them started to get serious when they went through the pandemic together, revealing “He became my family in that time.” The pair went on a road trip together from Los Angeles to New York during the summer of 2020. The couple would park their tour bus and Rihanna would grill barefoot while Rocky would tie-dye T-shirts from the gas station. She recalled, “I cooked our food on this little janky grill I bought from Walmart. I still have it, too. It works like nobody’s business.” But the best part about that time together she added is that “There’s no pretentious my-brand-your-brand bullshit, it’s just us living. I just feel like I can do any part of life by his side.”

The Fenty founder knew Rocky was really the one, however, when she took him home to Barbados for the holidays. “It was us who were going home,” she said. “We were going home.” And while her mom is typically difficult to impress, she took to the rapper right away. She continued, “My mother has a really good read on people. She observes first and then she’ll move slowly. I guess I’m like that too. There are some guys that I’ve dated that she won’t even look at to this day. But she was charmed by him from the jump.” Rocky also has a connection to the Caribbean island as his father emigrated from there. “To see him in a space where he’s imagining his dad as a boy, walking the same streets as his dad walked, eating the same food as his dad ate, it was really heartwarming,” Rihanna said.

But while the couple clearly has a lot of love to share, starting a family wasn't necessarily something that they thought would happen quite so soon. “Planning? I wouldn’t say planning,” the singer confessed. “But certainly not planning against it. I don’t know when I ovulate or any of that type of shit. We just had fun. And then it was just there on the test. I didn’t waste any time. I called him inside and showed him. Then I was in the doctor’s office the next morning and our journey began.” She concluded, “I always thought it would be marriage first, then a baby, but who the fuck says it has to be that way. I’m certainly not gonna let that get in the way of me being a mom.”

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