Real-Life Love
Joanna & Chip Gaines Reveal How They Dealt With ‘Struggling’ Years in Their Marriage
Former HGTV couple Joanna Gaines and Chip Gaines have always persevered during tough times. They have been happily married for over 20 years and have welcomed five children together.
Joanna and Chip recently revealed they’ve just started working out together for the first time. Working out hasn’t just strengthened their bodies; it has also made their relationship stronger. However, before they made it big, life wasn’t always so easy. In a new interview, Joanna and Chip opened up about a difficult time in their marriage.
On Don Saladino’s Stronger podcast, Joanna explained how she and Chip have had “non-negotiables from day one, whether we were struggling for the first 12 years of our marriage. Like every Friday was like, ‘Well, is this when we close our doors?’ Every day we showed up, it was like, ‘Well, if this all goes away, we still have each other.’ So that was the core and the foundation of who we are, who we were, and then now we have these five babies.”
The 47-year-old added, “Every decision we make, we say, ‘How will this affect this?’ I will say the one thing we’ve never been great at is, okay, we have this business that we love, that we’re truly passionate about, we have this family that is our #1 kind of thing, but then this wellness piece.”
Chip and Joanna have always been in sync. Chip admitted that if “all hell broke loose tomorrow” and he had to choose between “fame or success or this business” or his family, Joanna and kids will always come first.
He continued, “As I think about fame and success and money in comparison to my marriage and my family… [If] all of this would instantly go away, and my wife and my kids would be back on the farm, raising animals, we’d be a part of the FFA. Who knows what would happen next? But Jo and I, we believe we can have our cake and eat it too in the sense that I can be successful and I can have a healthy marriage and family.”
