‘Nothing could save us at that point’: Going through her divorce, Gwen Stefani saw Blake Shelton as a ‘problem,’ refused to even talk to him

There’s a popular love cliché that simply states, “the heart wants what it wants.” This seemingly straightforward phrase can have devastating effects on people affected, especially if they’re going through a break-up or a divorce.

This is exactly what happened to famous couple and The Voice coaches Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton, something the former explored in her new album Bouquet.

Stefani and Shelton couldn’t resit each other, despite both being in relationships

Stefani, 55, and Shelton, 48, were famously married to, and divorcing from, their significant others when they met. Stefani to Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale and Shelton to Miranda Lambert. At the time, Stefani was already the mother of three sons when she met Shelton: Kingston, 18, Zuma, 16, and Apollo, 10.

That alone was enough to give her pause when she realized she was developing heavy feelings for Shelton, she recently told People, while Shelton was also going through it with Lambert.

“We had just met, and it was chaos. Both of our lives were in complete turmoil, all over the ground. Nothing could save us at that point,” Stefani said. “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.'”

Of course, when you tell someone you don’t want to see them anymore, sometimes they find other ways to get your attention. For Shelton, that other way was with songwriting.

Stefani explained that Shelton “really wanted to impress” her because these days he barely writes songs at all. To her, songwriting is “everything.”

“If I want to feel like I have any kind of purpose or any kind of value or anything, it’s about writing a song. That’s where I get my fulfillment,” she said. Perhaps picking up on this, the two musicians started working on a tune he wrote that would eventually turn into a country duet called “Go Ahead and Break My Heart.”

His flirting game came from a smart place. He sent her the song, but only a “half-written” version of it, with a plea: “Help me finish this.” She couldn’t resist and immediately wrote the second verse of the song “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.” That simmering chemistry couldn’t simply remain in the digital world, even if Stefani had giant trepidations about running into the handsome Shelton’s arms (though she eventually did just that).

“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. 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,” she said, “and God putting Blake in my life was just that miracle.”

In November 2015, when the couple went public, Shelton’s ex Lambert said she believed “something’s been going on between these two for a lot longer than they’re letting on,” a source told Hollywood Life at the time. Well, the heart wants what it wants. What can you do?