Pink Opens up About the Challenges of Her and Carey Hart's Marriage After 15 Years Together
Pink and husband Carey Hart celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary in January, and Pink is the [...]
Pink and husband Carey Hart celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary in January, and Pink is the first to admit that a long-term marriage takes work. Speaking to PEOPLE, the pop star looked back on her years with her husband, telling the magazine, "We've really grown up together."
"When you first get together, you look at that person as your entire world," she explained. "One person can't be your entire world. You have to have your own passions, your own friends, your own time to yourself. I used to be super needy. Now we expect less of each other, and that allows us to give each other more somehow."
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Pink and Hart began dating in 2001 and separated in 2003 before getting married in 2006, and they are now parents to daughter Willow, 8, and son Jameson, 4. The couple separated again for nearly a year in 2008 before reuniting, and Pink credits therapy for helping them maintain their relationship.
"I am a huge proponent of counseling in general. We both have therapy, individually, and we do couples counseling," she said. "Long-term relationships are not easy. It is much easier to stay in the solid days and jump from relationship to relationship, because then you don't have to fix the problems that keep recurring. You have to end up fixing yourself; you can't fix the other person."
"So it can be challenging, and there's good days and there's bad days," she continued. "I think it's an impossible expectation for you to think that you're going to evolve at exactly the same pace as another person in exactly the same direction. So it takes work to redefine what's important. I don't want to break up my family. That's been my main goal, since I had a broken family. So sometimes you have to let it go. You can't die on every mountain."
In an Instagram Live chat with her therapist last year, the "Try" singer shared that she thinks couples therapy is the "only reason" she and Hart are still together. "I think partners, after a long time — I can't say it's a man and woman thing, I think it's a partner thing, a spouse thing — you just speak two different languages," she said at the time, explaining that their therapist helps with "translating" for them.
"We are not taught as kids how to have relationships, how to get along with people," she reflected. "I mean, what's happening in our country right now is a perfect example of that. We don't know how to love each other, we don't know how to get along, we don't know how to communicate."