Selena Quintanilla’s Husband Chris Perez Admits They ‘Started Talking About a Family’ Before Her Heartbreaking Murder
There have only been a few celebrity romances that have made our hearts melt, and Tejano superstar Selena Quintanilla and her husband Chris Perez’s love story is one of them.
The pair met and fell in love shortly after Perez joined Selena y Los Dinos in 1989. After eloping in 1992, Selena and Chris began planning their next milestone, which was to start a family together. But that dream never came true as days before celebrating their third wedding anniversary, Selena was tragically killed.
A look back and Selena Quintanilla and Chris Perez’s romance
As we mentioned before, Quintanilla and Perez’s love story began in 1989 after he joined the singer’s band as their new guitarist.
According to Perez, he was enamored by the singer the second he laid his eyes on her.
“Beautiful and talented,” he told Entertainment Tonight in 2017. “I’m a shy person by nature, and there was just something about her that she was able to pull me out.”
Though they tried maintaining a strictly professional relationship at first, the feelings Perez and Quintanilla had for each other were just too strong to ignore. They eventually let their feelings known one day inside a Pizza Hut and began dating shortly after that.
At first, Perez and Quintanilla kept their relationship hidden. The singer knew that her father and manager, Abraham Quintanilla, only wanted her to focus on music and would try to stop her from dating Perez if he found out about their relationship
And it turns out, she was right.
Shortly after she and Perez made their relationship official, Selena’s sister, Suzette Quintanilla, told Abraham about them, and he tried to keep the guitarist away from his daughter.
Abraham even went as far as to fire Perez from the band, reportedly calling him “a cancer” to the family.
But despite her father forbidding them from seeing each other, the singer and Perez continued dating in secret. Then on April 2, 1992, the pair eloped as Quintanilla believed that was the only way her father would accept their relationship.
Though Abraham was furious when he learned the couple had tied the knot, he came to accept their relationship over time. Eventually, he welcomed Perez into the family and back into the band.
Selena Quintanilla and Chris Perez experienced up and downs in their marriage
Quintanilla and Perez may have been hopelessly in love, but that doesn’t mean their marriage was perfect in every way.
While speaking with CNN in 2012, Perez admitted that he and the “Queen of Tejano” did not have much separation between their personal and professional lives, which caused problems to arise in their marriage.
“I think what it boiled down to is that we were young. We were married and together 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “We had to learn how to handle that and that was both of us.”
Perez says that he and the singer even contemplated divorce at one point in time.
“It’s not like she brought up the idea and I was fighting it because honestly I was right there with her,” he continued. “We communicated with each other and when that came out on the table it wasn’t like I hadn’t thought of it myself.”
Luckily, Quintanilla’s brother, A.B., helped her and Perez realize that they went meant to be. After A.B. painted a picture of how life would be if they went their separate way, the couple decided to stay together. And it wasn’t long after that that they began making plans to start a family together.
“The more we talked about it and the more time went on, it wasn’t a long time, maybe a month, we ended up patching things up and making a promise that we would never let that happen again,” Perez told the outlet. “We started talking about a family.”
Selena Quintanilla and Chris Perez’s marriage was cut short
Unfortunately, that major life step never came.
On March 31, 1995, just days before Quintanilla and Perez’s third wedding anniversary, the singer was murdered by the former president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldívar.
The singer’s death sent shockwaves throughout the world and left her family, especially Perez, numb with grief for years.
Though he eventually remarried and had children of his own, Perez has continued to hold a special place in his heart Quintanilla, who will forever be his first love.
