Gwen Stefani’s divorce from Gavin Rossdale was already tough enough to deal with. But what made it harder was that their break-up took away a dream that Stefani spent her whole life fantasizing about.
Gwen Stefani wanted her and Gavin Rossdale to have the same life as her parents
Stefani had high hopes for her and Rossdale’s relationship. For a while, it seemed like it would go the distance. The pair met in 1995 after touring together and started dating not too long afterwards. They were married six years later in 2002 before their shocking divorce in 2015. Stefani confided that the divorce came while unraveling a big secret Rossdale hid from her.
“It was the beginning of hell. Like six, seven, eight months of torture, trying to figure out this big secret,” she once told Harper’s Bazaar.
Figuring out what that secret was came at the expense of her family, including her three children with Rossdale.
“It was so insane because not only did my family break up, but then my kids are taken away like half the time, she added. “So that was really like, ‘What?! What did I do?’”
It was a far cry from the life Stefani envisioned for herself growing up and her parents’ life. Stefani’s parents married in 1966 and are still together to this day. Her mother and father raised her in a traditional, stable household she hoped to emulate with Rossdale.
“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,” she told People. “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.”
“Especially growing up with this perfect example of love between my parents,” Stefani added. “They met when they were 15, and they fell in love, and then they had us [children], and they made us feel like we were everything to them.”
But Stefani asserted that her parents’ almost perfect family life meant she wasn’t prepared to deal with divorce.
“And when you have a family and it’s the opposite of that, it breaks up… I didn’t know what to do or how to protect my children. And I’m still working on that,” she said.
Gavin Rossdale wished she and Gwen Stefani shared more of a connection
Stefani’s heartache didn’t last for long. She’s always credited her current husband, Blake Shelton, for helping her recover and restoring her faith in love. She might’ve even found the dream life she sought with the country singer. The pair started dating in 2015 and are still going strong.
Stefani, however, wasn’t the only person affected by her divorce, as Rossdale also had a difficult time moving on. The Bush frontman especially sympathized with his kids, who went through what their father did at an early age. Unlike Stefani, Rossdale’s parents divorced when he was just 11 years old.
“I feel bad for my kids, that’s it,” he said on the AJ & T.J. podcast. “I wish I could have found a way to not have that in their lives. It wasn’t fun for me to come from a broken home… It can be quite debilitating for kids… the overriding things is you don’t want to let your kids down.”
Perhaps to compensate for the divorce, Rossdale wished he was a bit closer to Stefani.
“The biggest thing would be when you see the kids that sometimes there’s a loss. It’d be nice if there was more of a connection with the person who made them with me,” he said. “I go to a lot of events where there’s ‘the other team,’ so to speak and I just feel really proud of myself in my consistency as a father. I know in my heart that I’m super consistent.”
