Marriage can certainly serve you a daily slice of humble pie, and our favorite wedding anthem singer is admitting it wasn’t always sunshine and roses with him and Chrissy Teigen.
In a recent interview on Jay Shetty’s podcast, On Purpose With Jay Shetty, John Legends spoke in retrospect regarding his longtime relationship — and shares that in their early years, he was “more than selfish then.”
If you follow famed influencer Jay Shetty on Instagram, you know he is no stranger to getting deep into the topics of love, relationships, and life’s lessons, and he gets his celebrity guests on his podcast to do the same. It was no different when he sat down with Legend.
“When we first met, we were very attracted to each other. Our chemistry was great, but that level of attraction is more like infatuation at the beginning of a relationship, and love, when it is able to stand the test of time, it has to be deeper and more real than that,” Legend shared. “We’ve been through enough together where it’s really fortified us and made us stronger. Those tests have made us grow together and realize things about each other that we didn’t know.”
The pair, who met in 2006 and just celebrated their 9th wedding anniversary, has always been public about their affection and admiration for one another. Chrissy has appeared in John’s music videos and acted as his muse for hits like “All of Me,” and most recently, “I Don’t Love You Like I Used To.”
The EGOT award winner describes the journey of his relationship with Chrissy, who he met in his mid-20s, and shares how much he had to grow into the partner he is today in order to preserve his marriage and navigate the ever-changing chapters of their life.
“When you stop being so selfish when you think about not only the joy you get from a situation and the pleasure you get from it, but also think about your responsibility and your commitment in that situation. You just grow, and you mature,” he said. “Part of it is it’s just a matter of time. You need time to become that person you want to be.”
Legend and Teigen share children Luna, 6, and Miles, 4. They’ve also experienced, with the utmost transparency with, their fertility issues, including the late-term pregnancy loss of their third child. The couple is now pregnant again and happily expecting the arrival of their next addition despite the adversities in their journey.
John gushed about how he admires his wife’s strength and ability to overcome such difficult circumstances, saying, “How she reacts to stress, how she reacts to life, how she can find a joke even in the craziest … even in grief, she’s able to find humor. I feel like you see so many things about your partner as you grow together and as you experience adversity together, and what I’ve seen from her just made me love her more and value her more. I think she’s cooler now than I ever thought she was. I just really have seen her in all kinds of situations. I just value her more and am in awe of her more than I ever have been.”
When it comes to how they wish to raise their children, he said, “I think Chrissy and I both really believe in the idea of creating stability in our home for our kids, showering them with love and encouragement, teaching them about what it means to be kind, what it means to be loving, what it means to be generous.”
Nothing worth having comes easy, John.
You can catch the full interview on On Purpose with Jay Shetty on all podcast streaming platforms now.
