Blake Shelton Said Gwen Stefani ‘Saved’ His Life During His Divorce

In 2015, both Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani went through divorces. They were judges on The Voice at the time, but they were not particularly close. He said he had no intention of starting a relationship with her, but they grew closer while navigating the ends of their respective marriages. Shelton shared why he felt Stefani saved his life.

Blake Shelton shared how Gwen Stefani changed his life

According to Shelton, he and Stefani had a friendly but distant relationship when they first met. Ahead of season 9 of The Voice, he announced to his fellow judges that he was getting a divorce.

“I won’t forget that day,” he told Billboard in 2016. “I looked over at Gwen — who I didn’t really know — and she had these huge tears in her eyes. I thought, ‘Wow, she feels super bad for me!’”

Afterward, Stefani asked to speak with him privately.

“I thought it was going to be another one of those things-are-going-to-be-OK talks,” he said. “She didn’t tell me much, because we didn’t know each other at the time, but she said, ‘I’m going through something very similar to what you’re going through. I understand. And I hate it.’ That’s kind of how our friendship and bond started, that day.”

They continued to check in on each other with increasing frequency.

“It went from that, to checking in on each other once a week through email — ‘This s*** happened to me, what happened to you?’ — to maybe three times a week, then every day, to ‘Hey, here’s my phone number if you ever want to text,’” he said. “Next thing I know, I wake up and she’s all I care about, and I’m ­wondering if she feels the same about me.”

He said that they were able to help each other through this painful time.

“Gwen saved my life,” he said. “Who else on earth could understand going through a high-profile divorce from another musician? You can’t even imagine the similarities in our divorces.”

Gwen Stefani said Blake Shelton’s divorce announcement felt like a gift to her

Stefani said she was trying to keep her divorce a secret on the set of The Voice. She felt astonished by Shelton’s announcement.

“There I was with my big secret, right?” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “And that’s when Blake was like, ‘Everybody, before we go out there, I want to let everyone know that by the time this airs, I will be divorced.’”

Having someone who understood what she was going through felt like a gift to her.

“[I felt] exposed somehow, you know?” she said. “But it was like being handed this gift of a friend who was going through the exact same thing at the exact same time. And then it was just like everything flipped. It went from horrible to, like, hopeful and, like, ‘Wow, God, you just don’t know what’s gonna happen next.’”

The couple felt that they had to heal before they got married

Stefani and Shelton got together in 2015, but they didn’t wed until 2021. She said they wanted to make sure their families were adjusting to their relationship first.

“I think there was a lot to consider when you have so many people involved,” Stefani told Today (via People). “Children, and their hearts, and everybody in my family [and] his family, we all went through a lot together.”

Though they talked about marriage, they also wanted to heal from their divorces first.

“So I think in a romantic way, when you fall in love so hard and so unexpectedly — and so late in your life — you think ‘I want to marry you!’ That’s the first romantic reaction, like, ‘Let’s get married,'” she said. “So we always talked about it, of course, and I think that as the years were going by, it didn’t need to happen. There was a lot of healing to do.”