Real-Life Love
How Blake Shelton Won Gwen Stefani’s Heart After She Almost Rejected Him
Gwen Stefani didn’t think she was ready for a relationship in the immediate years after her split from Gavin Rossdale. She had met her now-husband Blake Shelton while filming The Voice, and she admitted to pushing him away and nearly rejecting him for good.
“We had just met, and it was chaos,” the “Hollaback Girl” singer told 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.'”
Stefani and Rossdale split in 2015, just a year after welcoming their third child. Shelton and Miranda Lambert divorced that same year. Stefani revealed that Shelton was the one to take the initial leap in trying to take their relationship in a romantic direction — and he did it in the best way possible.
“I think he really wanted to impress me because he doesn’t really write songs as much as he used to,” Stefani said. “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.”
That song turned into “Go Ahead and Break My Heart,” a country duet he and Stefani released a year later in 2016. “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 recalled. “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.”
Stefani and Shelton’s love story blossomed from there, and they married in 2021. The No Doubt singer always wanted to have a great love like her parents have and “that dream was completely ruined” when she and Rossdale split. “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,” she gushed.
