Vince Gill, Amy Grant Talk Love, Divorce & Parenthood
Vince Gill and Amy Grant share the ups and downs of their love story in the May/June issue of AARP Magazine.
Their rocky road to love is one neither thought they'd ever go down. Amy had three children with her first husband, gospel singer Gary Chapman, and Vince had one daughter with his ex-wife, Sweethearts of the Rodeo member Janis Oliver Gill. "We were both married, and though we were crazy about each other, we thought, 'Well, that's not our life'," Vince tells the magazine. "The hard truth was that we never thought for a minute that we would wind up together."
Despite speculation, the couple maintain that they never cheated on their previous spouses. Although, they couldn't deny their attraction for one another, beginning when they worked together one night in late 1993. "I knew from the tips of my toes that he was unlike anybody I had ever met," Amy remembers, "and that I related to him on such a cellular level. I was just so overwhelmed by him as a person that I finally came up behind him and wrapped my arms around him and said, 'I've needed to do this all night.'"
While her now-husband shared her feelings, his reaction was much cooler. "He went, 'Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!'" Amy recalls. "It was weird. It was all caught on film, too."
Vince announced his divorce in 1997, with Amy's marriage dissolving a year later. They soon began dating. "It was hard," Vince says. "The kids, the popularity of our lives, a lot of tongues waggin'."
The couple married in 2000, but the road of their fairytale was still filled with potholes. Amy's three children were particularly hard on Vince and initially rejected the change. Things eventually smoothed out, with Vince crediting Amy for successfully blending their families. "[Amy is] the glue of this whole family," he says. "She bonded all of us in a blood way that really did connect us."
The ever-modest Amy has a different take. "It's like a broken bone that grows stronger if it heals properly," she explains.
Soon after their marriage, Amy and Vince were blessed with a daughter, Corrina. However, Amy did worry about the toll the pregnancy would take on her body. "Having that baby at 40 really shot my stomach, and I was just having a good cry about it," she admits. "Vince came in, and I was drooling and snot was coming out, and I said, 'Women get invisible.' And he said, 'I love you, and you're more beautiful now than you were when I first met you. I can't wait to see what you look like with a head full of gray hair.' And he meant it."
A decade later, Vince's opinion hasn't wavered. "What's funny is I see old photographs of Amy in her 20s, and she's much prettier these days," he confirms with a laugh. "She still does it for me."
Read the full AARP interview with the happy couple here.
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