After seven years together, Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds and his wife Aja Volkman are splitting up.
Reynolds announced the breakup via Twitter on Thursday.
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after 7 beautiful years together, Aja and I’s marriage has come to an end. Our children continue to be the most important thing in our lives, & we will continue to co-parent them with all our love.
— Dan Reynolds (@DanReynolds) April 26, 2018
I ask that you please respect our privacy at this time as we work through this as a family.
— Dan Reynolds (@DanReynolds) April 26, 2018
“After 7 beautiful years together, Aja and I’s marriage has come to an end. Our children continue to be the most important thing in our lives, & we will continue to co-parent them with all our love,” Reynolds wrote. “I ask that you please respect our privacy at this time as we work through this as a family.”
The couple have three children together — Arrow Eve, 5, and twins Gia Games and Coco Rae, 1, who were born last March.
Volkman is a musician in her own right, working as the lead singer of the indie rock band Nico Vega.
In 2016, Reynolds revealed he suffered from ankylosing spondylitis (AS) since he was 21 years old, and had been battling a serious case of depression for several years. The disease resulted in him suffering from “debilitating” back pain, making it nearly impossible to perform at live events.
“It was beyond the pain that you feel when it’s just a back ache. It felt like someone was drilling my nerves,” Reynolds said in an interview with PEOPLE. “It was right when the band was starting to have minor success — we were starting to sell out small clubs, and we were playing these very active shows and it started to make me have to cancel shows.”
“I couldn’t get on stage. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t sleep at night, I couldn’t perform without standing perfectly still. I couldn’t sit down for more than a half an hour,” he continued.
Reynolds admitted he was nervous about revealing his condition to his loyal fanbase.
“I was shy to reveal it because it made me feel like something was wrong with me, or — to say the word disease, it’s such a drastic sounding word,” he explained. “And I didn’t want to admit to myself, or to anybody, that I was struggling with a disease.”
Since his diagnosis, he has been hard at work raising awareness about his physical and emotional struggles on social media, as well as encouraging others to do the same.
“I have a chance to really raise awareness and help people that are just becoming diagnosed to see that there’s actually light at the end of the tunnel,” he said while promoting his new project, This AS Life Live!, a partnership with the Spondylitis Association of America (SAA) and Novartis giving people an honest look at the disease.
