Have We Noticed That Every Time Drake Dates a Woman He's Not Really Dating Her?

One day, Drake is going to be in a serious relationship.

That day is not tomorrow.

And what’s the rush to get him paired off, anyway? He’s only 30 and, as one of the most successful rap artists alive right now, he swims in a sea populated by far more fish than any average male ecosystem could possibly comprehend.

Yet Drake-in-love seems to be the preferred persona among his fans, particularly when it pertains to his great public love, the yin to his yang, his sometime duet partner and the fuel that seemingly keeps his fantasies going.

That would be Rihanna, of course.

Their relationship has been waxing and waning like the tide for nearly eight years now. But despite their hipnotically tumultuous history, Drake has never looked particularly lonely when the tide’s out.

He’s always linked to someone or other, sometimes a very famous woman, sometimes a less famous woman, but always…someone.

And while the word “dating” is thrown around a lot, we have a feeling that’s a very subjective term in Aubrey Drake Graham’s case.

For instance, Drake has gamely allowed a list of women that he has spent any time with at all, whether one dinner or a passing crush, to be called his “dating history.”

It’s a catch-all, like Taylor Swift ‘s “exes.” (Speaking of which, that recent dating speculation was quashed pretty quickly, so we’ll leave Swift out of this.) We don’t mean that he’s manipulating women who want more; rather, every time he’s in the proximity of a woman for any reason, she becomes his rumored new love interest.

“I don’t know if it was a date,” he told Ellen DeGeneres in 2013 when he was quizzed about an outing to Disneyland with Tyra Banks. “It was a get-together. We’re close as well. This [game] is really bad…How did you not tell me about this?” (He and Tyra stayed friends, as last year’s “Child’s Play” video showed.)

Kat Dennings made the Q&A cut as well, and Drake explained: “I just always had a huge crush on Kat and she was kind enough one night to oblige me and we went out for dinner.”

“He’s a lovely person. He’s a nice man,” the Two Broke Girls star recalled around the same time.

Ellen always asks about Rihanna, though. Just like a lot of people, Rihanna is the one Ellen thinks Drake should be with. “We had our moment,” he said. “Always support and have love for her, and…yeah.”

But whether it was his lyrical mate Nicki Minaj, whom he pined for in song again and again; Serena Williams, who’s now engaged to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, but who played a lot of tennis in front of Drake in 2015; or even, yes, Rihanna, Drake hasn’t been in a serious, walk-the-red-carpet-together relationship (like your average “in-a-relationship”-on-Facebook level) with any of them. 

Even when he and Rihanna were supposedly dating again last summer, it seemed more a result of proximity and by October they had fizzled—but not before Drake splashily presented RiRi with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award at the MTV VMAs in August. “She’s someone I’ve been in love with since I was 22-years-old,” he Ri-revealed.

So when he’s romantically linked to Jennifer Lopezin December, when they spend New Year’s Eve together, are we supposed to think for any reason that this is going anywhere? Doesn’t it make much more sense that, as Page Six reported Sunday, they’re hanging out and Drake is making the most knowingly creepy face ever on Instagram because what they’re actually doing is teaming up musically?

Drake said, during his New Year’s Eve set at Hakkasan in Las Vegas, which J.Lo watched from a VIP table, that he had new music coming this month, after all.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a romantic element to Drake and J.Lo’s relationship. A source has told E! News that they’re not keeping company for publicity but, that being said, Lopez was “having fun” and didn’t consider Drake a potential serious boyfriend. (The other theory, that Drake tends to pine for the small handful of women on earth who aren’t having him, can wait for another day.)

Online you can find the debunking or further probing of speculation linking Drake to more than a dozen women over the past decade, including the ones mentioned above—much of that speculation resulting from song lyrics or a flirty Instagram photo.

It sounds as though someone doesn’t mind being speculated about…

“We’re really good friends, actually…He has my back so it’s really nice to know I have a guy that’s a good friend like that,” Rita Ora once said about Drake in 2012 after he wrote her single “R.I.P.” and she appeared on his song “The Feeling of Pain.”

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star Tatyana Ali, who got married last July, made a cameo in his 2013 song “Tuscan Leather” but later confirmed on The Real that the dinner he rapped about in song never took place.

“He happened to be at the same club that I had my birthday party at, Supper Club [in L.A.]. He got me a bottle of champagne…we took a picture and then the picture went everywhere,” Ali said.

“We’re just friends,” Zoë Kravitz, asked about looking like more-than-friends with the Grammy winner, told Hip Hollywood in 2014. But of course she’d work with him, “he’s so talented and awesome,” the actress added.

Well, what we can’t argue with is that Drake has a lot of friends and he loves to hang out.

Antiquated terms, like “dating,” “rekindling,” “back on” and “in love,” need not necessarily apply.