Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade had a complicated path to happily ever after, but the couple are no longer shying away from discussing their ups and downs.
The former NBA player started seeing the actress following his divorce from high school sweetheart Siohvaughn Funches in 2007. Wade and Funches, who didn’t finalize their divorce until 2010 after a lengthy custody battle, share two kids: Zaire and Zaya.
“My divorce was taking forever. She wound up having 13 different lawyers in the process. So every time you get a new lawyer, the case starts over,” Wade explained in his 2020 ESPN documentary, D. Wade: Life Unexpected. “I’m having a hard time having a relationship with my kids, seeing my kids. A lot of times she would not bring them out and I would have to get the police involved to find her. … It became ugly and nasty.”
The basketball player ultimately won full custody of his two oldest kids and started rising his nephew Dahveon Morris. “My emotions were all over the place because on one hand, you want to celebrate a victory, but on the other end, no one wins,” he said in the doc. “There’s no winner in a custody battle.”
Wade and Union, meanwhile, dated for several years before they took a break in 2013.
“When you’re debating whether to go backward or forward, you have to look at the original issue,” she told Glamour in 2014, noting their brief breakup was due to “distance and scheduling.” She explained, “I finished filming the show, then I flew to Vegas right away to start shooting Think Like a Man Too. I couldn’t take time off, and I missed some quality togetherness we desperately needed.”
While the pair were apart — and before he proposed in December 2013 — Wade got together with actress Aja Metoyer and later found out she was pregnant.
“I had a time, a part in our break, in our pain and our hurt, a blessing came out of it in my life, having a son that was born healthy,” he told reporters during a press conference in December 2013 amid rumors about a child named Xavier Zechariah Wade born in November of that year. “I’ve always tried to show my importance in my kids’ lives and it doesn’t change now. So, I, my lady and my family have continued to move forward, and I think that’s evident with the ring and the proposal that I gave her.”
Union and Wade went on to tie the knot in 2014. After she suffered several miscarriages, the couple welcomed daughter Kaavia in 2018 via surrogate.
Scroll through for their candid quotes about Wade’s son with Metoyer:
