His Honey Bee no more. Country’s cutest couple Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert announced to Us Weekly on Monday, July 20, that they are splitting after four years of marriage. “This is not the future we envisioned,” the stars told Us in a joint statement via their reps. “And it is with heavy hearts that we move forward separately.”
Here, Us takes a look back at Shelton and Lambert’s sweetest quotes about each other during their high-profile marriage, now made bittersweet in the wake of their breakup.
– “I didn’t know if it was just initial butterflies… I don’t know what it was,” Lambert told Hoda Kotb in 2011 of first meeting her husband at CMT’s 100 Greatest Duets Concert in 2005, where they performed together. At the time, Shelton was still married to his first wife Kaynette Gern; the two divorced in 2006. “It was just this draw to each other.”
– Shelton recalled the same moment in an interview with VH1’s Behind the Music in 2011. “I’ve never had that kind of experience with anybody,” the Voice coach recalled of their electrifying performance. “I was a married guy, you know? Standing up there and singing with somebody and going, ‘Man, this shouldn’t be happening.’ Looking back on that, I was falling in love with her, right there on stage.”
– The couple got married in May 2011 in Texas, and shared their wedding photos with Us Weekly exclusively. “This is going to be my last marriage, and hopefully hers too,” Shelton told Us at the time. “I didn’t want to propose until I knew it was time. I want it to last.”
– “I’m a little rough around the edges sometimes,” Lambert told Good Housekeeping in a 2012 interview. “The best example I can set is to be real and show my flaws. I can be pretty intense, and I can be a downer.” Meanwhile, she gushed about her husband’s gift for making her life better. “He laughs at everything, and it’s hard for him to be serious, which can sometimes be annoying. We balance each other out, though; he lightens my heart, and I rope him in.”
– In May 2014, Lambert made fun of rumors plaguing their marriage. “I think I’ve had like five sets of twins in the last two years,” the “Automatic” crooner joked. “And we’ve been divorced four times, and one of us had a $100 million divorce.”
– In June 2014, Shelton revealed the romantic wedding anniversary surprise he had planned for his wife to mark their third year of marriage. “I drove down to Lake Texoma,” Shelton told Us at the time. “We’ve got a boat down there and marina. I’m not a mechanic, but I managed to get this thing running, because I know when she gets back, she’s gonna want to do something like that—just go and float around and drink and get pulled on the tube or something. So I thought ‘Well, I’ll get me some points in the end and get the old boat running.’ So I did.”
– “She means so much,” Shelton said of his wife in the same interview with Us Weekly last June. “I do think some of that early tabloid stuff that happened probably did have an effect on her. And I was upset for her to go through it. And I think there will be a reflection—when you listen to the album—a reflection of some of those times that are going to be in a song she has called ‘Priscilla.’ It’s kind of known that that’s directed straight at me. She wears her heart on her sleeve.”
– In November 2014, Shelton detailed to 60 Minutes how he and his wife cling to privacy. “We try so hard to keep people’s focus on what we do and not our marriage,” Shelton reflected at the time. “It’s almost impossible to do that, and why open that door any further than it already is open by sitting down and doing interviews together and giving every freakin’ magazine out there a two-sentence quote that’s turned into alien babies… There’s no reason for us to do that. We do interviews [separately], I love talking about her, I’ll talk about her all day if you want to. But for her and I to sit here together, it’s just going to turn into something about our marriage and it’s all we got left that’s private, is she and I and our home. And we just want to keep it that way.”
– Later that year, in December, Lambert opened up to Marie Claire about her husband’s positive influence on her. “I’m not sunshine and roses. Blake’s the happiest person on the planet,” Lambert told the mag for its January 2015 issue. “He pulls me out of my darkness … Literally, everything is the best about being married.”
– In the June 2015 cover story of Country Living, Lambert discussed life at home with her husband, sharing some insight on their day-to-day lives. “We’re building a new house, and I’ve been saving inspiration on Pinterest,” the Southern native told the mag. “A friend of mine recently said, ‘I can see your Pinterest boards, and all you have on there are dog rooms.’ My husband and I have 15 rescue animals, and I spend way too much time planning our pets’ spaces. I’m like, okay, I probably need to move on to the laundry room!”
