Gwen Stefani Says She Almost Called off Blake Shelton Relationship in Its Early Days

Gwen Stefani nearly called off her romance with Blake Shelton before it got started. The “Somebody Else’s” singer, 55, looked back on how her 2016 divorce from Gavin Rossdale impacted the start of her relationship with Shelton in a new interview with PEOPLE.

Stefani and Shelton first met in 2015 as coaches on The Voice, with the “God’s Country” artist also going through a split with ex-wife Miranda Lambert at the time. For Stefani, who is mom to sons Kingston, 18, Zuma, 16, and Apollo, 10, with her ex, it wasn’t ideal timing for her to start a new relationship, despite how she and Shelton felt about one another.

“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 told the outlet. “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.’”

Eventually, Shelton was able to change Stefani’s mind, writing her a song that would eventually become their 2016 duet “Go Ahead and Break My Heart.” Stefani recalled, “He sent it to me, and it was a half-written song. He was like, ‘Help me finish this.’ So I wrote him the verse back — the second verse on the song — and it’s just over text.”

The “Purple Irises” singer remembered fondly, “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.”

The musical gesture worked, and Shelton and Stefani would go on to get married in 2021. “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,” Stefani told PEOPLE, “and God putting Blake in my life was just that miracle.”

“Especially growing up with this perfect example of love between my parents. They met when they were 15, and they fell in love, and then they had us [children], and they made us feel like we were everything to them,” the singer added. “And when you have a family and it’s the opposite of that, it breaks up … I didn’t know what to do or how to protect my children. And I’m still working on that.”