Millie Bobby Brown has revealed how her fiancé Jake Bongiovi helped her accept and love herself.
In an interview with Glamour, the Enola Holmes actor credited the up-and-coming musician with helping her “embrace” all the parts of herself that she didn’t like or accept. She told the outlet that Bongiovi made her feel like she could be herself, which was a breath of fresh air for Brown given the public scrutiny she’s endured since skyrocketing to fame at age 13 for her portrayal of Eleven in Netflix’s Stranger Things.
“When I met Jake, I just felt I could be loud. He embraced that and encouraged that. And I fell in love with myself while being with him,” she explained to the outlet.
At times, Brown - who openly struggles with feeling insecure - said that she’s doubted Jake’s love for her, because deep down she felt like she was too much. “I was like: ‘Why do you love me?’” Brown admitted. “And then he listed all these things that I hated about myself. I was like: ‘You see good in those things?’ And he was like: ‘Of course I do.’”
She continued: “Those are things that I love about myself now. He was a really big, huge part of me loving myself and becoming a woman. It was like: ‘Wow, I really love this person because he allows me to love myself.’”
Brown’s journey to self-love hasn’t been an easy, linear path. During the interview, she candidly remarked that she had felt “like s***” that day because she had a “huge pimple on her face.” She added: “I’m going to go on Instagram, and I’m going to see five different girls that look beautiful! Flawless! Stunning! And, OK, slay,” she said.
Inevitably, she added, she’ll find herself “sobbing, because I know, I know I don’t look like that.”
It’s not just social media that’s taken a toll on the actor’s self-esteem, but past relationships as well. In the interview, she mentioned that before her relationship with Bongiovi, she had been reeling from an “unhealthy situation,” seemingly referring to her relationship with former TikTok personality Hunter Ecimovic.
After Ecimovic made some lewd remarks about Brown on Instagram Live and claimed to have “groomed” her, Brown told Allure in 2022 that she felt “powerless” and “publicly humiliated”.
As she was reeling from the “unhealthy situation” with Ecimovic, she met Bongiovi, who completely changed the way she viewed relationships. Before Bongiovi, the actor was afraid to take up space in relationships and be herself, noting: “I think I was so afraid to be a strong woman in a relationship.”
Brown described the immediate intensity of the connection she felt with Bongiovi as “bizarre” and much different than anything she had ever experienced before.
“I wanted to be the woman that my mom is to me and I wanted to be the woman that my grandmother was to me,” she continued. “So that was never my, like, intention, to be a wife. But after meeting Jake and seeing: ‘Oh, I don’t have to be this stereotypical wife for him.’ He doesn’t want me to be that either. He wants me to go and do my thing and live my life, and he will hold my hand in the process of that. I was like: ‘Oh, I do want this.’”
Brown and Bongiovi, the son of rock singer Jon Bon Jovi, announced their engagement in April 2023. The 19-year-old actor shared a black-and-white photograph with Bongiovi, 20, wearing what appeared to be an engagement ring on her left hand. She captioned the Instagram post with lyrics from Taylor Swift’s song, “Lover”.
“I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, I want ‘em all,” she wrote, adding a love-heart emoji.
The couple had a private engagement party two months later, where they posed for pictures in front of heart-shaped white balloons and a light-up sign that read: “Mr & Mrs Bongiovi”.
