Taraji P. Henson and Kelvin Hayden have split. The 50-year-old actress confirmed she was single again during an interview with Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club on Monday.
Henson and 37-year-old Hayden, a former NFL pro, got engaged in May 2018 after two years of dating. Henson said they tried to do couples therapy to save their relationship before ultimately deciding to call it quits.
“I haven’t said it yet but it didn’t work out. You know what I mean?” Henson said of their relationship. “I tried, I said, ‘let’s do the therapy thing’ but if you’re both not on the same page with that, then you feel like you’re taking it on yourself and that’s not a fair position for anybody to play in a relationship.”
“My happiness is not his responsibility and his is not mine,” she continued. “We have to first learn how to make ourselves happy, to make each other happy. So, when one person is taking on the weight of the entire relationship, it’s never going to work. You have to show up, yes you want to be understanding but you can’t lose yourself in that understanding. You have to still stand up for yourself and be there for yourself but it’s hard to do if the other person isn’t doing that either.”
Back in May 2018, Henson talked to ET about Hayden’s romantic proposal, which took her by complete surprise.
“He takes me where we had our first date, I didn’t put that together,” she shared. “I didn’t put it together until we went into the party room after we ate, and I saw a violinist, ’cause he was trying to say it was his friend’s birthday — which it was, on Friday — ‘Oh, Ronald’s gonna have a little get-together in the back room.’ And I was like, ‘Aw, that’s perfect. We’ll already be there.'”
“I go back there and I go, ‘Ronald’s not into violins, what’s going on here?'” she continued. “And as I’m putting the dots together, I turn around, he’s on his knee and then the river of tears just started and my lashes ended up on the floor.”
ET again spoke to the Empire star in April, and she talked about wedding planning during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Well, everything, it’s halted. It was supposed to be June, but it’s complicated with corona,” Henson, who previously told ET her original wedding date was Apr. 4, 2020, shared. “Corona has everything [up in the air] because now you’re talking about a date that you had planned that you might not be able [to stick to.] It’s a mess. It’s a mess, so it might be in the backyard.”

“It’s probably going to be a backyard wedding,” she continued. “It would break my mother’s heart, [after] all these years, she had been wanting to see me get married and [now] it’s got to be virtually?”