Gwen Stefani is opening up about learning how to receive love.
During a conversation with Jeff Cavins on the prayer and meditation app, Hallow, the 56-year-old singer spoke about feeling like she has never “experienced active love,” before meeting Blake Shelton, a feeling Cavins also referred to as “Christ’s love.”
“I also experienced active love, I think, for the first time when I met my husband, because I had never really received active love,” she said. “And I don’t think I knew how to even receive it. Like it was just like I would be so uncomfortable when someone was sacrificing or actively trying to love me through their actions by maybe sacrificing something.”
Shelton and Stefani first met in 2014 when she signed on to be a coach on season seven of “The Voice.” While their relationship started out professional, they began a romantic relationship in 2015 when both separated from their previous spouses.
After five years of dating, the two got engaged in October 2020 and tied the knot a year later, in July 2021 in an intimate ceremony at Shelton’s ranch in Oklahoma.
Since getting together, the couple have released many duets together, including “Nobody But You” and “Purple Irises,” and have been there for each other for major life events, such as getting their stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“I kind of stopped checking things off my list of great accomplishments in my life when I married Gwen,” he said in his speech during the ceremony, adding that getting his star “is just the icing on the cake,” and she will always be “the greatest thing that’s happened along this journey.”
During the conversation with Cavins, Stefani also spoke about how her relationship with God has also evolved, saying, “I thought that I had something” but that she can’t compare it to what she has now.
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“I remember feeling like I know I can do all these things — like when I get on stage I turn into this person, right, which is totally part of who I am — but I don’t know why or how it happens. It felt weird, and I would get really scared about it,” she explained.
She recalled wondering every time she got on stage or sat down to write a song if she would be able to do it, saying, “I always had so much anxiety about it.”
The Grammy Award-winning singer admits she knew her talent “wasn’t coming from me,” but said she “didn’t necessarily know it was coming from God.”
“I always thought it would be very arrogant to say, ‘Oh, this is my gift. This is what I’m talented at. This is what I’m good at,'” she added. “But then I remember at a certain point in the last 10 years going, ‘No. God made me to do this. And if I don’t do it and share it, that’s a sin. I have to keep doing it.'”
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She continued: “Even if it’s not through being in a church and talking about it, but just through sharing my story through a song — even if it’s a silly song, it says bananas in it, and it makes people happy when they go to college — whatever it is, that’s what I was made for, I guess.”
Stefani added that she had to learn to accept that “God chose me to do that.”
