Rosario Dawson Has Found 'Her Person' with Boyfriend Cory Booker — but She Had to Be Sure She Wanted It

"It's the first time I felt like I had to be responsible about my choice of love, which is a challenging thing to do," Dawson told Bustle

There has been one perk for Rosario Dawson after boyfriend Cory Booker ended his 2020 presidential campaign in January.

“He’s here!” the Briarpatch and Daredevil actress and mom-of-one told Bustle this week — meaning Booker, a New Jersey senator, is able to spend more time with his girlfriend since he’s no longer criss-crossing the country to see voters.

In fact, on the day of Dawson’s Bustle interview earlier this month, Booker, 50, was not too far away getting lunch.

“It’s the first time I felt like I had to be responsible about my choice of love, which is a challenging thing to do,” Dawson, 40, told the outlet of her romance with the politician, whom she began dating in the fall of 2018.

“If you fall in love, you fall in love,” she said. “But there’s another aspect I had to consider: what this meant in [putting] a microscope on my family and particularly on my daughter,” Isabella, whom she adopted six years ago.

Indeed, Dawson’s coupling with Booker pulled her into the spotlight of the political press and lent some celebrity to his campaign. But theirs wasn’t an election-season fling.

“In each other I think we found our person,” she told Bustle.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty

From left: Sen. Cory Booker and Rosario Dawson. Bonnie Biess/Getty

In a Washington Post profile in October, both she and Booker talked about their relationship: how they met, how they fell for one another and how they found time together despite their schedules.

“Look, both of us, you know, we’ve had relationships,” Booker told the Post, “but I’m not sure if I’ve ever fully given myself over to a relationship as much as I have with her and allowed myself to be as vulnerable.” (He has said he’s even wrote her love poems.)

Dawson said then: “For my whole life, I’ve always felt like, even when I got into a relationship, I was trying to be the center of the storm and everything was just this maelstrom out there. But for the first time, I feel like I have someone in the center of the storm with me.”

She told the Post she was “absolutely in love” with Booker — but you’d hardly have guessed there might be wedding bells in their future when they first met in the summer of 2018.

“There was no love connection there,” Booker said.

But it didn’t take long for that first flame-out of a meeting, when they were both at a political fundraiser for a mutual friend, to be replaced by a spark a few months later.

Meeting again that October, “We talked for hours and hour,” Booker told the Post in the fall.

Araya Diaz/Getty

Given their very different — and very busy — schedules, their time together has ebbed and flowed. Still, even apart they have kept in close contact, according to the Post: That has included two FaceTime calls a day (when possible) and romantic gestures such as him sending her music every morning and reading David Benioff’s “City of Thieves” to her over the phone.

According to her new Bustle profile, Booker and Dawson are preparing to vacation together.

As she told the Post last year: “We’re here and we’re thriving. And I want more of that. And I want that for the rest of my life.”