Happy anniversary to Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani! The country and rock music superstars were married three years ago today, on July 3, 2021.
The couple began dating in 2015, after meeting on The Voice. When they first met, Shelton was still married to Miranda Lambert, while Stefani was married to Gavin Rossdale, so they had very little time to interact outside of their jobs on The Voice. In fact, Shelton was a bit starstruck when he first met Stefani in 2014.
“She surprised everybody with a performance of ‘Hollaback Girl,’ and then they announced that she was going to be a coach,” Shelton told People. “I remember enjoying her performance, and then after the show, we all took a group picture. It was very much an industry-type meeting, and I told people, ‘I met Gwen Stefani. That’s crazy.'”
When Stefani officially joined the show, she had just become a mother of three, with the birth of her third son, Apollo.
“She had just had a baby, so there wasn’t even much of a friendship that first season,” Shelton said. “The thing I remember saying about her when people would ask was, ‘Oh my God, that girl is unbelievable. She drives a minivan to work!” I thought rock stars drove Rolls-Royces, and Gwen was driving a black minivan.”
It wasn’t until they both were going through their respective divorces that they began a friendship, which eventually turned into a romance.
“It’s not something anybody could’ve seen coming besides God I guess because it doesn’t look like it would make sense,” Shelton shared on CMT in 2016. “All I can tell you is that it does. It just makes the most perfect sense for us and where we’re at in our lives.”
‘Gwen saved my life last year. She did,” he added. “I think she’d tell you something similar about me.”
Shelton and Stefani collaborated on “Go Ahead and Break My Heart,” from his 2016 If I’m Honest album. The song became a catalyst in their relationship, and was their first duet together.
“Originally, when I started the song, I was only trying to impress her, just trying to write her a song to get her excited about me,” Shelton said (via Songfacts). “I sent her the song half-finished and she wrote the other half of the song, so it’s such a 50/50 emotionally invested thing.”
Shelton proposed to Stefani in December of 2020, at his Oklahoma ranch, after he had been discreetly carrying the ring in his truck for a couple of weeks.
“I had my birthday party and — it wasn’t a party. It was a birthday COVID moment in my house when I turned whatever it was I turned,” Stefani recounted on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “So we got there and everybody was like, ‘No, we got to get back. We’re cooking a hobo stew on the fire, and we can’t let it burn,’ and my son was like, ‘No, I got to go to the bathroom. I don’t want to go,’ and it was like all these things happening.
“And I walked in and my son was sitting right by this fireplace,” she continued. “Blake basically was getting down on his knees to do a fire and he goes, ‘Hey, can you look in that cabinet over there and get me a fire starter?’ So I opened the cabinet and there was a ring in a box and I was like, ‘Ahhh! What? Are you serious?’”
It was Carson Daly who officiated the ceremony, which was limited in attendees because of the pandemic.
“At the wedding, Gwen starts, and she wrote this, ‘Since I was a little girl …’ And she crushes it, not a dry eye in the church,” Daly revealed on the Today Show. “It was so perfect. I said to Blake when she was done, ‘Top that, buddy.’ And Blake starts by saying, ‘Gwen’s always giving me a hard time about not writing enough songs, so I wrote a song.’
“Guitar comes in frame, stool, next thing you know, he wrote her a song. He sings her a song while he’s crying that he wrote specifically for her. … Not a dry eye in the house,” he continued. “That was really a highlight. It was a bunch of pinch-me moments. It was just their family. It was small. It was perfect.”
At Shelton’s ceremony, inducting him into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, ahead of his wife who was inducted in 2024, Shelton gushed about being married to Stefani.
“I kind of stopped checking things off my list of great accomplishments in my life when I married Gwen, so this is just icing on the cake,” Shelton said. “I love you, so much, and that’s the great thing that’s happened along this journey.”
It was his marriage to Stefani that prompted Shelton to bid farewell to The Voice, where he was since its inception in 2011, in part to spend more time with his three stepsons, which is now his highest priority.
“If I walked away from my career at this time, the only thing that I run the risk of is having regrets that I’m missing out on some more important things in life,” Shelton told People. “For now, that’s our kids. This isn’t about me anymore and never will be again.
“Even though I’m a stepparent, I take that job very seriously,” he continued. “The kids see me as a very important person in their life. [When they ask], ‘Why isn’t Blake here?’ I take that stuff to heart. I’ve made plenty of money, but you can’t buy time back. I don’t want any regrets.”
After being together for almost nine years, Shelton is still as smitten with Stefani as ever, and maybe more.
“If you would’ve told me the first season that we met that what was gonna happen, I would’ve been like, ‘No, we actually don’t even have anything to even talk about’… It’s crazy how things work out,” Shelton told Entertainment Tonight.
Shelton and Stefani have another duet at radio, with “Purple Irises,” from Stefai’s next album. Download or stream the song here.