If not for a song, Blake Shelton might have never married Gwen Stefani. The two, who met when they were both coaches on The Voice, bonded over their shared experience of divorce, with Shelton’s marriage to Miranda Lambert ending the same time Stefani was splitting from her husband, Gavin Rossdale. In the middle of their heartbreak, the two realized they were developing feelings for each other, feelings that Stefani came precariously close to pushing aside.
“We had just met, and it was chaos,” Stefani recalls to People. “Both of our lives were in complete turmoil, all over the ground. Nothing could save us at that point. 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.'”
Undeterred, Shelton wrote the first part of “Go Ahead and Break My Heart,” a song that became the couple’s first collaboration.
“He sent it to me, and it was a half-written song,” Stefani recalls. “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. 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.”
In hindsight, the No Doubt singer realizes that Shelton had another motive for sending her the song, besides just creating a duet.
“I think he really wanted to impress me, because he doesn’t really write songs as much as he used to,” Stefani says. “And I love writing songs. That’s everything to me. 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.”
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Stefani and Shelton wed in 2021, and now the mother of three couldn’t be happier with the way her life turned out, especially coming after so much heartache.
“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,” Stefani shares. “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.”
It might have been Shelton that pursued Stefani, but he is still shocked that he is the rock star’s husband.
“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 tells Entertainment Tonight.
It was his relationship with Stefani, and becoming a stepfather, which led Shelton to leave The Voice, after 23 seasons, in 2023.
“I did The Voice for 12 years,” Shelton said on Country Countdown USA. “It took over my life. The whole idea was to get some life in before it’s too late. We have three kids, and I try to spend time with them. I’ve had a couple years since I retired from The Voice, and it still doesn’t feel that long.”
Stefani and Shelton’s new duet, “Purple Irises,” a song from her latest Bouquet album, is out now.