Gwen Stefani Told Blake Shelton ‘That’s Not Happening’ When They Met (Exclusive)

Gwen Stefani looks back on her love story with Blake Shelton.

The pop icon, 55, and the country superstar, 48, first got together in 2015 while working as coaches The voice – and both survived divorce after splitting from Gavin Rossdale and Miranda Lambert, respectively.

At the time, Stefani, who has sons Kingston, 18, Zuma, 16, and Apollo, 10, with ex-girlfriend Rossdale, was hesitant to pursue another relationship despite her feelings for Shelton.

“We had just met and it was chaos. Our lives were in total disarray, all over the floor. At that point, nothing could save us,” Stefani tells PEOPLE. “There was a point where I was like, ‘I can’t even talk to you. That’s crazy. I have enough problems already. That doesn’t happen anymore. We’re not going to text or anything.’”

Undeterred, Shelton eventually won Stefani back – with music.

“I think he really wanted to impress me because he doesn’t write songs as much as he used to. And I love writing songs. That’s all for me. If I want to feel like I have some meaning or purpose.” “It’s about writing a song for me,” she says.

Shelton then began writing “Go Ahead and Break My Heart,” a country duet that he and Stefani released in 2016.

“He sent it to me and it was a half-written song. He was like, ‘Help me finish this.’ So I wrote the verse back to him – the second verse of the song – and it’s just above the lyrics,” she says. “That was the first song we ever wrote together. We were never in the same room, but we wrote a song for each other.”

These days, Stefani and Shelton are partners in life and in duet. The couple married in 2021.

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to get married and have the love that my parents had and gave birth to. This dream was completely ruined; “I was devastated and had to figure out how to move forward and pursue a new dream,” she says, “and God bringing Blake into my life was that miracle.”

The two have also collaborated on several other songs over the past nine years, including “Purple Irises,” which appears on Stefani’s new album bouquet (available now).

“We come from such different worlds. “Our musical tastes are different, but we come together in this one place: we both love ’70s soft rock and yacht rock,” she says, adding that when they first got together, “We always played that game, and we did it on a song and say, “Do you know this one?” And it would always be these 70s songs.

Their shared love of yacht rock eventually inspired “Purple Irises,” a romantic song about Shelton that became a duet and set the tone bouquet as a whole.

“He loved the song so much he said, ‘Save it!'” she remembers.