Chip and Joanna Gaines reflect on 'adversity' they faced in marriage – and how they overcame it
Chip and Joanna Gaines are opening up about their marriage.
In a March 27 interview with People, the couple said they faced a lot of adversities after they got married in 2003.
“In the first months of our marriage, we were always flipping a house," Chip Gaines said. "We were working on this little shop. We had babies early in the process. We pretty quickly had to say, ‘We’re either going to go at each other and blow this thing up, you and I trying to fight each other about every nook and cranny, or we can figure out how to come together as a team.'"
As you can imagine, they chose the latter. However, working through their problems wasn't exactly easy.
“We’ve had our challenges. I don’t want to belittle that piece of the equation,” Chip Gaines said. “But Jo and I — I don’t know if it’s our hearts — we’re aligned in this sweet way to where we’ve just always been there for each other.”
He added, “When adversity came against us — when your natural tendency is (to be) almost the ugliest to those people you love, especially in times of real pressure — with Jo and I, we felt adversity and would get together like a little team and say, ‘What do you think the problem is?’ As opposed to maybe typically being like, ‘Well, it’s because of that thing you bought’ or ‘because of that dumb thing you did.”
Joanna Gaines said they were able to get along because they both had a very strong sense of who they were prior to getting married.
“The biggest thing is we met at a time when both of us felt pretty grounded in who we were as people by ourselves. I feel like Chip, he was a visionary. He had these businesses,” she said. “And I was at a place of fully knowing who I was. It wasn’t the ‘you complete me’ thing.”
“We made each other stronger," Chip Gaines said.
Joanna Gaines added, “The best is that we’re growing together.”
But even though they've overcome so much, the couple said they still need to figure out an ideal work/life balance.
“I think the challenge is it’s hard to shut off. It’s hard to figure out the line of ‘Oh, that’s business. Okay, this is marriage.’ It all kind of blurs,” Joanna Gaines said. “We’ve tried to be like, ‘Let’s go on a date and not talk about business.’ So we’d sit there and be like, ‘The garden is doing great today. . .' You had to exercise these new muscles. When we go on dates, sometimes we get energized by talking about how to problem-solve. So I don’t know. Sometimes there’s no clocking out.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
