Lena Dunham Says She and Ex Jack Antonoff Are Both 'Happily Married' to Other People 8 Years After Breakup: 'Exactly Where We Need to Be'

Lena Dunham reflected on the emotional conclusion to her five-year relationship with Jack Antonoff.

During the Wednesday, April 15, episode of TODAY With Jenna & Sheinelle, the Girls alum, 39, recalled how difficult it was losing her “first love” amid fertility issues.

Dunham and Antonoff dated between 2012 and 2018. In 2017, the actress underwent a hysterectomy to treat pain from her endometriosis, which removed her ability to bear children.

“Everybody knows what it’s like to sort of have your first love and create a narrative about what that’s going to be. It’s a super powerful, potent feeling. Unless someone is lucky enough to marry their seventh-grade boyfriend, we all know what it’s like to have that dream come to an end and to grapple with that,” she explained.

Dunham continued, “I sort of wanted to bring that experience to the page. My experience also losing my fertility at the same time…a lot of dreams came to an end. The amazing thing about life is it takes you where you need to go. We’re both happily married now, and clearly, we’re exactly where we need to be. I have so much gratitude that he was there for me at that time in my life.”

Antonoff has been married to Margaret Qualley since 2023, while Dunham wed Luis Felber in 2021.

In her memoir, the director shockingly revealed she cheated on Antonoff, 42, with her middle-school boyfriend after undergoing her hysterectomy.

“In the cab, we hugged again, and I said this: ‘I’ve been through something awful. I don’t want to talk about it, but I need you to f--- me and I need you to do all of the work,’” she recalled telling a man named Nick.

Dunham described their intimacy as “euphoria that in recent months only intravenous medication had provided.”

“It wasn’t a sexual pleasure really…but I had complete thoughts for the first time in months,” she added. “They sounded something like this: I am an adulteress. I am a c---. My intestines are where my womb should go, but look at this, I am alive.”

The cheating continued while Antonoff was on tour and eventually led to their split.

“We put our foreheads together and wept. In some fit of delusion, I asked if we could still go on dates,” she wrote. “‘We can do whatever you want,’ he said, the relief making us both euphoric with adoration.”

In a 2018 essay for Vogue Australia, Dunham admitted her health struggles also contributed to what drove her and the songwriter apart.

“My beautiful partner, who has seen me through so much pain with compassion and care, has to be away for work, and I can feel us growing slowly apart, since life is so determined to display its full complexity right now,” she expressed at the time. “I am surly and distant. I offer nothing. He reminds me again and again that I am still a woman and still alive, but I also know that soon — for so many reasons that have nothing to do with my uterus — we’ll slip away from each other and I will face everything I am losing in impossibly tiny steps.”