Gwen Stefani Told Blake Shelton to Stop Texting Her Before They Started Dating: ‘This Is Not Happening’
Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani began dating as they navigated their respective divorces. They first looked to each other for support, and then began to develop romantic feelings. Stefani said that her feelings for Shelton sent her into a panic. She told him that they had to stop communicating with each other.
Gwen Stefani told Blake Shelton they couldn’t be together
In 2015, Stefani and Gavin Rossdale ended their marriage. Their divorce sent her life into a spiral.
“It was the beginning of hell,” she once told Harper’s Bazaar. “Like six, seven, eight months of torture, trying to figure out this big secret.”
At the same time, Shelton and Miranda Lambert were divorcing. He and Stefani were coaches on The Voice at the time, and they leaned on one another through their heartbreak. Before long, their friendly relationship turned romantic. Stefani admitted this initially panicked her.
“We had just met, and it was chaos,” she told People. “Both of our lives were in complete turmoil, all over the ground. Nothing could save us at that point.”
She told Shelton that they needed to slow down.
“There was a point where I was like, ‘I can’t even talk to you. This is insane. I already have enough problems. This is not happening anymore. We’re not going to text or nothing.'”
He won her over with a song
Shelton turned to music to win over Stefani. He began writing the song “Go Ahead and Break My Heart” and reached out to her about helping him with it.
“I think he really wanted to impress me, because he doesn’t really write songs as much as he used to. And I love writing songs. That’s everything to me,” she said. “If I want to feel like I have any kind of purpose or any kind of value or anything, it’s about writing a song. That’s where I get my fulfillment.”
They didn’t work in the same room, but the collaboration brought them closer together.
“He sent it to me, and it was a half-written song. He was like, ‘Help me finish this.’ So I wrote him the verse back — the second verse on the song — and it’s just over text,” she said. “That was our first song that we ever wrote together. We were never even in the same room, but we were writing a song to each other.”
Blake Shelton said his feelings for Gwen Stefani developed through their conversations
Shelton said that his feelings for Stefani steadily grew after he announced his divorce to the Voice coaches. They had a private conversation afterward, during which she divulged her own marital problems, and continued to check in on each other.
“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 told Billboard. “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.”
The couple married in 2021.
