Last fall, Lana del Rey did some typically lowkey promotion for her album, Norman F–king Rockwell, and she ended up confirming the fact that she was dating a cop. Not just any cop – a good-looking reality-show type of cop named Sean Larkin. He’s one of the police officers on A&E’s Live P.D. They met in New York last September. He was her date to the Grammys this year. He’s tall. And he was also profiled this week in the New York Times. You can read the full piece here – there’s a section devoted to Lana and he’s very open about it and respectful of her, but he confirms that they’re no longer together.

You can try to get Mr. Larkin to tell you how he met Del Rey, but he won’t. (They crossed paths through work in New York and “just kind of hit it off from day one,” he said.) When Del Rey started dating Mr. Larkin, she was about to release the biggest and certainly most critically acclaimed album of her career. But “a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, did you even know who she was?’” Mr. Larkin said. “Like, of course I knew who she was.”

They did “boyfriend, girlfriend type of things together,” Mr. Larkin said. In L.A., they went to the beach and watched people surf. They went shopping and grabbed coffee. In Tulsa, they ran errands. They went to Target. It was “very low key,” he said. But of course there was some glamour. “I was asked if I was nervous and not at all,” Mr. Larkin said after the Grammys, where he walked the red carpet with Del Rey. “We drive cars 120 miles per hour, and I don’t want to sound like a tough guy, but I mean, when you’re behind a known shooting suspect and he jumps out the car running, you’ve got to get out chasing.”

The Grammys, by comparison, were more tame. “Taking pictures and answering questions. I’m not trying to sound like a bravado tough guy, just like, you know,” he said, and paused. “It was enjoyable, for sure.”

Mr. Larkin says the relationship was pretty normal. “When we were in Tulsa we hung out with my law enforcement friends and their spouses. We all Super Bowl partied together, dinners and things like that,” Mr. Larkin said. “Normal things couples do with their friends.”

Still, telling his 17- and 22-year-old children about “Dad’s new girlfriend” got the expected reaction, Mr. Larkin said: “They were kind of blown away.”

Mr. Larkin finds out about new music from his kids, which he said “helps me stay relevant. As silly as it sounds, even in my job as a police officer. If you stay on top of music that some of these guys are listening to, it’s something relatable,” Mr. Larkin said of people he encounters in the course of his work. “If you stop them in a car and they’ve got whoever playing the radio, and you know who it is, you start talking to them about it, and it’s kind of an icebreaker.”

In any event, he’s not seeing any musicians at the moment. “Right now, we’re just friends,” he said of Del Rey. “We still talk and whatnot, we just have busy schedules right now.”

[From The New York Times]

While I would never date a cop at this point in my life, I find Larkin attractive and I’ll buy that Larkin has major Big D–k Energy. I also think Larkin was probably a lot different than the guys Lana usually dates, and maybe the BDE was what got her traveling back and forth to Tulsa. Personally, I’m getting a kick out of the image of Lana hanging out in Tulsa cop-bars and going to cop BBQs and making conversation. Still, you never know – she probably did enjoy it for a time. I bet she got some new Americana-heartland ideas for her music too. New music will have references to the Oklahoma plains and badges which cover broken hearts.

Photos courtesy of WENN.