Gwen Stefani Thought She Had Too Many Problems to Date Blake Shelton
When Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton began dating, they were each freshly out of marriages from Gavin Rossdale and Miranda Lambert, respectively. Stefani did not think it would be a good idea to throw herself into a new romance. Still, she found herself developing feelings for Shelton. She told him that they needed to pump the brakes because she had too many problems in her life already.
Gwen Stefani didn’t think she should date Blake Shelton so soon after her divorce
Stefani was married to Rossdale for over a decade before she reportedly discovered his infidelity. She tried to keep many of the details secret for her children’s sake, and she said the truth behind their separation would shock people.
“Nobody [knows the specifics of the divorce] except for my parents, the people involved, and whoever they told,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2016. “Nobody would believe it if I could really say what happened. I went through months and months of torture.”
One of the few people outside her family who Stefani confided in was Shelton. He announced to the coaches on The Voice that he was getting a divorce. Afterward, she privately told him that her marriage was ending too.
The pair continued to check in on each other. At first, it was friendly, but they began to develop romantic feelings. Stefani didn’t think she was in a good place to start a new relationship.
“There was a point where I was like, ‘I can’t even talk to you. This is insane,’” Stefani told people. “‘I already have enough problems. This is not happening anymore. We’re not going to text or nothing.'”
Gwen Stefani said she and Blake Shelton have more in common than it seems
Of course, Stefani and Shelton eventually began a relationship. When the news broke, many people were surprised, as they seemed quite different. Stefani said they share common ground in music, though.
“We come from such different worlds. Our musical tastes are different, yet we do come together in this one place: We both love ’70s soft rock and yacht rock,” she said. “We would always play this game, and we would put on a song and say, ‘Do you know this one?’ And it would always be these ’70s songs.”
The couple married in 2021
While Stefani had reservations at first, she came to see Shelton’s presence in her life as a blessing.
“Something that I wanted since I was a little girl is to be married and have this love that I saw my parents have and have babies,” she said. “That dream was completely ruined; it was crushed, and I had to figure out how I was going to move forward and make a new dream, and God putting Blake in my life was just that miracle.”
After years of dating, they tied the knot in 2021. Stefani said they began talking about marriage long before this.
“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, per People. “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.”
