Gwen Stefani took time to celebrate her husband Blake Shelton‘s birthday. Shelton turned 49 on June 18, an occasion Stefani remembered with a montage of photos and videos of their time together.
Stefani captured the post by saying, “Happy birthday to my greatest love Blake Shelton. You are my everything!!”
Shelton and Stefani began dating in 2015, while they were still reeling from their unexpected divorces from their former spouses. The two met while they were both working as coaches on The Voice, although neither of them could have ever predicted they would end up falling in love.
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“She had just had a baby, so there wasn’t even much of a friendship that first season,” Shelton recalls to People. “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.”
Stefani also admits that nothing about their early relationship gave any indication of the romance that was about to unfold.
“We had just met, and it was chaos,” Stefani tells 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.’”
It was, not surprisingly, a song that ultimately convinced Stefani to date Shelton. “Go Ahead and Break My Heart” not only became their first duet, but gave Stefani the courage she needed to date Shelton, even though their relationship seemed unlikely to last.
“He sent it to me, and it was a half-written song,” Stefani remembers. “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.”
Fortunately, true love prevailed, and Shelton and Stefani wed in 2021. For Stefani, it’s a better love story than she could have ever imagined for herself.
“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.”
Thanks to their two successful careers, Shelton and Stefani divide their time between Los Angeles and his Oklahoma ranch. But for Shelton, home is wherever Stefani happens to be.
“She comes to Oklahoma, and it’s not like this now, but at first, she had to have felt like ‘Where am I? What is this place?’” Shelton tells WKML “This is not how she grew up, and the same goes for me. I’d go to LA, and it’s like, ‘What is this place? How do I fit in here?’ And I would still feel that way if she wasn’t there.”
“And I think the same thing with her, for when she comes to Oklahoma,” he continues. “It’s just that’s what completes the journey for us. It’s just as long as we’re together, it really doesn’t matter.”