Blowing off steam. Gisele Bundchen once wrote an emotional letter to husband Tom Brady after a heated altercation — but she never sent it.
Bundchen, 38, reflected on the incident in her new memoir, Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life. “Once, when Tom and I were having a rough time, I got an email from him that hurt my feelings. He was in Boston at the time, and I was in Costa Rica,” she recalled. “Instead of retaliating by sending a hurtful email back, I took out a pen and a piece of paper, and for the next hour I wrote down my thoughts and emotions, the things that made me angry, the things it made me frustrated, everything I was feeling at that time. I didn’t censor myself.”
The former Victoria’s Secret Angel explained that the letter had “no restrictions” and she had written almost three pages. “I also felt relief. It’s much more helpful to me when I write my thoughts out in longhand. It’s between me, my pen, in my paper. Writing by hand also illuminates the danger of impulsively pressing send and then not being able to take my email back,” Bundchen wrote. “The words in front of me felt honest and intense – crazy intense, actually. Just writing them down made me feel 100 times better. In the end, I never sent the letter.”
One day later, Bundchen decided to burn it: “It was it by writing the letter, my turmoil had left me and gone to my writing hand, onto the sheet of paper, and then the fire burned it all away.”
After she rid herself of the note, the model wrote a very different letter to the NFL star, 41. “The next morning, I sent Tom a brief email telling him I was only willing to be in a relationship that was based on love and respect, and that I look forward to us talking whenever he was ready to speak to me in a loving and respectful way,” she explained. “A day later, we did just that.”
In her memoir, Bundchen has been candid about the struggles in her marriage to Brady and how his career has impacted their family life. She revealed that the New England Patriots quarterback’s training left her balancing most of the parenting responsibilities on her own when their children — Benjamin 8, and Vivian, 5 — were young.
“You’re overwhelmed and tired and you’re not the nicest to your partner,” Bundchen wrote, ultimately revealing that the tough times made the pair a more united front: “When someone you love is happy, it makes you happy. Or if they’re sad, it makes you sad. You suffer with them and you have joy with them.”
Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life is out now.
