The Smashing Pumpkins frontman opened up about meeting Chloë Mendel when she was 19 — and why her not yet being wounded by life changed everything for him.
Billy Corgan has never been shy about having an opinion, but this one came with a warning label. Sitting down with Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli on the New York Times’ *Popcast*, the Smashing Pumpkins singer was asked whether it helps that he and his wife, Chloë Mendel, come from two different generations — he’s 59, she’s 33, and they met back in 2012, when he was 44 and she was 19. “I don’t want to make all the feminists mad,” he joked before answering anyway.
His point, in his own words, was about timing and damage. Women born in the ’90s, like Mendel, grew up as feminism was rising “as a way to balance properly a lot of things,” he said. Women of his own generation, by contrast, were “going through that without a lot of help and coming out of a lot of abuse,” which made relationships harder to build: “it was harder to put those pieces together if you’re broken and they’re broken.”
He was careful to say there was “nothing wrong with them” — the women he dated along the way. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he explained. “I was shocked at the stories I would hear of what they’ve been through.” Mendel, he said, was simply different: “When I met my wife — and having that gap — she just wasn’t affected by those same politics. She just had a different version.”
Then came the line that has everyone talking: “Her youth was an advantage because she hadn’t been wounded like so many people are — because you just go through life and you get wounded.” Corgan said Mendel carried “a different sense of self-confidence,” that she was “really open to love and the possibility,” and that, to his amazement, she “just decided not to judge me for who I was, particularly in that moment.”
However fans feel about the math, the life they’ve built since is very real. Introduced by a mutual friend in 2012, the couple got engaged in 2022 and married in 2023. Mendel — a fashion designer and the CEO of House of Giles — and Corgan share three children: son Augustus, born in 2015, daughter Philomena, born in 2018, and daughter Juno, born in 2025. Viewers got a look inside the partnership on his 2024 reality series *Billy Corgan’s Adventures in Carnyland*, and Corgan told ScreenRant at the time that, speculation about their age difference aside, “we’re partners in life. We really are a 50/50 endeavor here.”
The 247 Take — Strip away the headline and what Corgan is really describing is luck: he met someone whose heart hadn’t been hardened by life yet, at the exact moment he was finally ready to stop being hardened himself. Fourteen years, three kids and one very public wedding later, the two of them clearly found their own balance — and it’s hard to argue with a love story that’s still being written.
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Sources: The New York Times’ *Popcast* (the original interview) | People | Loudwire | Entertainment Weekly
