Blake Shelton is looking forward to many more years with his wife, Gwen Stefani.
Speaking with ET’s Cassie DiLaura from his new bar, Ole Red Las Vegas, on Wednesday, the 47-year-old country singer reflected on how much his life has changed over the last decade since he met Stefani, 54, during her freshman season as a coach on NBC’s The Voice. At the time, she was just months out from welcoming her third child with Gavin Rossdale, whom she split from in 2015.
During their 12-year marriage, the No Doubt singer and Bush frontman, 58, welcomed three sons, Kingston, 17, Zuma, 15, and Apollo, 10. In November 2015, three months after filing for divorce from Rossdale, Stefani announced that she and Shelton were seeing each other. Earlier that year, Shelton had announced a divorce of his own from fellow country singer Miranda Lambert, who he was married to for four years.
Looking back on the 10-year anniversary of their first meeting, Shelton said that while they didn’t really talk much during her first season on The Voice as she had just given birth to Apollo, it didn’t take long for their lives — which were “falling apart,” according to tabloids at the time — to fall together.
“You would see her out at the red chairs if there was a production meeting or whatever and I feel like I got to know Pharrell [Williams] more that year than I did Gwen,” he said of her first year. “It wasn’t until the season she came back, the next one, that the pieces were falling together.”
While naysayers criticized Shelton and Stefani’s unlikely romance, saying they didn’t believe the love would last, the couple is still going strong all these years later. Furthermore, their nearly decade-long relationship has made the “Boys ‘Round Here” singer a staple in Stefani’s sons’ lives and a better man for it, too.
“If I could have a repeat of these past 10 years, [that] would be perfect,” he said of what he hopes the future holds. “Next month, we’ve got an 18-year-old, which it blows my mind that already happened. And in a couple of years, we’ll have another 18-year-old. And that’s… it’s gonna be I guess a lot more alone time, which I’m not mad about that either.”
He added, “But we still have Apollo, so we have another almost 10 years before we can kick him out, so it should be a lot of fun.”
As for whether or not Kingston, Zuma and Apollo have made him see things differently as a person, Shelton said they have changed him “in every possible way.” While he has known the boys since 2014, the singer officially took on the title of stepdad in July 2021 when he and Stefani tied the knot, less than 12 months after he popped the question, which came five years into their relationship.
“I learned quickly, not because anything happened, but just, you know, reading the room, you’ve really got [to think], ‘I have to take a step back,'” Shelton said of his mindset shift while stepping into the role of stepdad. “When people say it’s not about you anymore when you have a kid… I think, if you’re doing it right, it’s not about you anymore. That’s true.”
The GRAMMY Award nominee has long been open about his commitment to raising Stefani’s kids and embracing them as his own from the get-go. In a 2022 interview during the Country Radio Seminar, he pointed to his own father who raised his younger brother by marriage as his guiding light for how to approach the situation.
“He took Richie on and raised him from the time he was 1 year old, and my brother never thought of my dad as anything other than his dad,” Shelton said at the time. “The example that my dad set for me was that [child] was not even a consideration [in a romantic partnership]. You got three boys? Awesome! My dad did it. My dad raised me. I could do this. I didn’t know what I was signing up for, but I was all about signing up for it. And every day I’ve fallen in love with the boys as much as I do with Gwen.”
The relationship between Shelton and the boys is not a one-way street, though. He told ET that while they have certainly impacted how he sees the world, he has done the same thing for them, giving the teens a completely different perspective from that of their rockstar British dad and punk princess mother.
“I get to teach them the country, you know, and I love that,” Shelton said. “Whether it’s music, whether it’s literally getting out, getting their hands in the dirt or being out on the ranch, seeing the animals, whatever, you know? I absolutely love being the person that gets to introduce them to that stuff.”
As for how whether or not he still pinches himself at getting to wake up next to Stefani every day, Shelton said some things will never change and that includes being shocked by how fate played a hand in their love story.
“No, oh my god,” he said when asked if he ever imagined finding a love like the one he has with the No Doubt singer. “I don’t know how you can imagine when you find that life partner, that missing piece, you know, you didn’t know what was missing?”
Shelton continued, “If you would’ve told me the first season that we met that — what was gonna happen, I would’ve been like, ‘No, we actually don’t even have anything to even talk about, you know? What are you talking about?’ … It’s crazy how things work out.”
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