Before the emerald ring. Before the Malibu mansion. Before eight years of carefully guarded love with a Coldplay frontman, Dakota Johnson had a quietly eventful romantic life that most people never paid attention to. And that was entirely by design.
Dakota has always been someone who treats her personal life as exactly that. Personal. But the relationships she built before Chris Martin arrived in 2017 reveal something important about who she is as a partner: someone who gravitates toward artists, someone who values stability, someone who has always preferred long, private, real commitments over anything that plays well for cameras.
Here is the full story of the three men who shaped Dakota Johnson’s love life before the world was even watching.
Noah Gersh: The First Love Nobody Knew About
Every romantic history has a foundation, and Dakota’s is Noah Gersh. A musician and co-founder of the indie rock band Partybaby, Noah was not a Hollywood name. He was not famous. He was simply the person Dakota Johnson fell for before any of this mattered.
According to The Unauthorized Biography of Dakota Johnson by Marc Shapiro, Gersh would be Dakota’s anchor for her remaining years in school and for some years later. That word, anchor, says everything about what this relationship was. Not glamorous. Not headline-grabbing. Just steady and real, the kind of grounding that a teenager navigating a famous family and an uncertain future genuinely needs.
The two started dating when Dakota was either 16 or 17 years old, and their relationship ended around 2012 as Dakota got more and more famous.
That trajectory is a familiar one. Fame has a way of quietly dismantling things that were built in a different, smaller world. Noah was part of the version of Dakota that existed before the red carpets and the magazine covers, and when that version of her life transformed, the relationship could not fully follow.
What is notable is how little either of them ever said about it publicly. No messy split, no pointed interviews, no lingering bitterness that anyone could detect. It simply ended, the way first loves often do, not with drama but with distance. No one knows for certain how long Gersh and Johnson dated, nor why or when they broke up, but the media has consistently referred to Noah as Dakota’s first love.
She has never publicly discussed him. That restraint, that protectiveness over something real and private, would become one of the defining characteristics of every relationship she ever had.
Jordan Masterson: The Actor, the Apartment Renovation, and the Quiet Exit
After Noah, Dakota’s next known relationship was with Jordan Masterson, an actor perhaps best known to television audiences for his recurring role in Last Man Standing and his earlier appearance in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He is also the half-brother of That ’70s Show star Danny Masterson, though that connection brought more attention to their relationship than either of them seemed to want.
Dakota Johnson and Jordan Masterson dated for about two years. In September 2013, it was reported that they had been together for roughly a year. By that timeline, the relationship started sometime around 2011 or 2012, overlapping with the tail end of the Noah Gersh era or beginning shortly after.
The most revealing public moment from this relationship came in a March 2014 interview with Elle magazine, where Dakota was asked about a memorable gift she had received. Johnson gushed about Masterson’s Christmas present for her, saying, “He gave me double sinks. He did it himself. I think double sinks are the key to any relationship.”
It is such a specific, domestic, unglamorous detail to share publicly, and that is exactly what makes it so telling. A boyfriend who renovates your bathroom for Christmas. A girlfriend who finds that more romantic than jewelry or a trip somewhere expensive. It paints a picture of two people who were genuinely comfortable together, building something real in private.
Reports suggested that when news of Dakota being cast as Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey became public, the sudden surge in attention around Dakota may have created friction. Jordan’s sister, Alanna, posted on Twitter at the time to show support for Dakota, but the couple split not long after.
No details or confirmed reasons for Dakota and Jordan’s split have been published, and the media can do nothing but speculate. What is clear is that by mid-2014, Dakota was single, filming one of the most talked-about movies of the decade, and about to meet someone who would change her romantic life entirely.
Matthew Hitt: The Rock Star Romance That Kept Starting Over
If Noah Gersh was about stability and Jordan Masterson was about quiet domesticity, Matthew Hitt was something different. Something with more electricity and, as it turned out, more turbulence.
Matthew James Hitt is a Welsh model and the lead singer and guitarist for the American-Welsh indie rock band Drowners. He moved to New York to pursue modelling and formed the band after meeting fellow musicians through what he described as simply boozing with them. He was creative, unconventional, and completely outside the Hollywood ecosystem Dakota had grown up inside.
Reportedly, their relationship began in July 2014, but they parted ways by December 2014. Later, around April 2015, multiple reports confirmed that Dakota and Matthew were back together. After almost a year, in June 2016, E! News confirmed they had split up again.
On and off. Together, apart, together again, then finally over. It was the first time Dakota’s romantic life showed that pattern, one that would resurface later with Chris Martin on a much larger and more public scale.
A source told Just Jared at the time: “Dakota and Matthew have dated on-and-off for the past two years. They didn’t get a chance to see much of each other recently because their work schedules didn’t align. She’s been up in Vancouver shooting the Fifty Shades trilogy.”
Distance and competing careers. It is the most common ending in Hollywood, and it is rarely the whole story, but in this case, it appears to be most of it.
There were also reports, never officially confirmed, that Dakota’s parents did not fully approve of the relationship, as they were hardly ever seen with the couple, which the media took as an indication of the speculation. Dakota, characteristically, said nothing about it publicly. She had already developed the habit of keeping what mattered most completely to herself.
What All Three Relationships Had in Common
Looking at Noah Gersh, Jordan Masterson, and Matthew Hitt side by side, a clear picture of Dakota Johnson as a partner begins to emerge. She is drawn to creative people, specifically musicians. She prefers privacy over performance. She has never been someone who uses a relationship as a career accessory or a public relations tool. And she tends toward commitment, not casual.
Even now, having matured over the years since her early relationships, Johnson has admitted that she prefers long-term relationships and is not interested in short-term arrangements the way many other celebrities are.
That preference runs through everything. A childhood sweetheart, she stayed with him for years. An actor she dated quietly for two. A rock musician, she kept returning to it even after the first ending. And then, beginning in October 2017, a Coldplay frontman she spent nearly eight years loving in near-total silence.
She described her approach to that relationship in an interview with Elle, saying, “We’ve been together for quite a while, and we go out sometimes, but we both work so much that it’s nice to be at home and be cozy and private. Most of the partying takes place inside my house.”
And when that relationship ended in June 2025, after eight years, a secret engagement, a shared home, and a bond with his children that she described as one of the most important of her life, Dakota walked out into the world and was asked on live television what she now required in a partner.
She told Today’s Craig Melvin simply: “Just like, not an a–hole.” Her Materialists co-star Chris Evans chimed in: “That’s concise. There it is. Nail on the head.”
She laughed. The crowd laughed. And somewhere in that moment was every relationship she had ever had, and everything she had learned from all of them.
