Vince Gill and Amy Grant Talk About Their Past, Marriage and Kids

Vince Gill, 52, and Amy Grant, 49, who will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary in March, talk candidly in the February issue of Good Housekeeping about the public perception of their early relationship and the lesson they’ve learned from their second marriage.

The couple has been on the subject of endless tabloid fodder, especially when they first got together, Grant, a pop and christian singer says,
“I don’t mean this in a flippant way,” says Amy when asked about the media scrutiny surrounding her divorce from singer — and fellow contemporary Christian singer Gary Chapman. “But I was so unconcerned by what somebody who I would never meet wrote in a rag. I felt like I had flipped a car over three medians and I was trying to figure out if my children — if we all — still had a pulse. I could not imagine going through life not by Vince’s side. [Then I’d] hear people saying, ‘I heard so-and-so say they’re not playing your records anymore.’ I had to trust that eventually everything was going to be OK.”

Acknowledging the past of their life, Grant says, “The one thing we never tried to do is to say that life began for us the moment that we said, ‘I do,'” Grant says. “A whole lot of life had gone before that, and it was worth, in time, integrating in a healthy way.”

Their respective divorces more than a decade ago has been a thing have to deal with,
“From time to time it still comes up, and you want to say, ‘Come on, we’ve beat this into the dirt,'” Gill says. “But we just dismiss it in a way that is respectful.” The country superstar recalls a day when a man approached him in a guitar store. “I’d never met him and he said, ‘I owe you an apology. When you and Amy got married, I told my children that you were wrong. And now I’m going through a divorce.'” At that moment, Gill said he was glad he didn’t lash out at any of the critics. “Not all Christians feel and act and do things exactly the same,” he said. “If you always try to take the high road, then everybody has a chance to benefit.”

They have the marriage work by feeling these things,
“You can laugh together easily. And trust each other. And spend lots of time together. And have great fun in bed! Yes! A fabulous sex life!”

Knowing the personality of each other and accept it, is the key to long marriage. But they have meet in the right time of their lives,
“He has a quick temper,” Grant says, “and I’m as stubborn as the day is long. Through our early lives, we came to understand that you make the choices you make, and if those screw up, then you learn to make new choices. Somebody who has been in a very bad wreck is going to be very conscientious about not speeding through a yellow light….You just learn so many good lessons when you go through a failed marriage. If we had married at 21 and 24, it would have been completely different.”

To unite their 4 kids together as family is hard and easy, they have known the answer,
“It was a long haul to feel like a family again,” says Grant (Gill’s daughter, Jenny, was 17; and Grant’s three children, Matthew, Millie, and Sarah, ranged in age from 12 to 7 when they first got together). “The parents have made a choice, but none of the kids have made the choice. And wherever it’s going to wind up, you’re not going to get there quickly. You just have to give people their space. There have been a lot of hands-down, pivotal turning points, with a lot of words and tons of emotions.”

And feel the blessing on the present of their 8 years old daughter Corrina,
“[Corrina’s birth was] a great blessing for us,” says Gill. “All of a sudden, we all had something in common. And we didn’t know it at the time, but it really provided a sense of glue.”

Vince adds he was concerned about then-teenage daughter Jenny, saying, “When I went through my divorce, there were some things [printed] in certain magazines, and I despised the way it made my kid look. So as a parent, there’s a side of you that just builds a wall and says, ‘You can ask all you want, but you’re not gonna get any of that stuff.'”

Amy also struggled with the perception many fans had of her Christian faith at time, saying, “The toughest thing, as a believer, is to see how Christianity is pigeonholed into this one ‘did-you-get-the-memo-on-how-to-vote’ kind of thing. I am somebody who feels very spiritually alive, and prayer is an integral part of my daily life, along with confession, worship — all of those things. But I see how all that’s been quantified, and made a caricature of, and I don’t want to add to a cultural experience that turns people off.”

Of the lessons she’s learned since marrying Vince, Amy says, “You get into a second marriage and you go, ‘Oh man, some of those weird dynamics, those were just me, and I’ve just dragged them off to the future! I shouldn’t have been so hard on that first chapter!'”