Oprah Winfrey is opening up about her long-time romance with boyfriend Stedman Graham and admitting that she actually doesn’t think the two would still be together if they had gotten married.
The mogul made the surprising confession in a new interview and revealed that there was a period in the 1990s where they were seriously considering tying the knot – but decided against it for the sake of their relationship.
“Nobody believes it, but it’s true. The only time I brought it up was when I said to Stedman, ‘What would have happened if we had actually gotten married?’” she recalled in the September issue of Vogue magazine. “And the answer is: ‘We wouldn’t be together.’”
“We would not have stayed together,” she then clarified, “because marriage requires a different way of being in this world.”
Oprah also revealed to the magazine that she believes if the two had gotten married all those years ago that she wouldn’t have been able to have the incredible career in television that she’s enjoyed over the past several decades.
Explaining that Stedman has a “traditional” idea of what a marriage should be, she claimed that she “would not have been able to fit into that” as a wife.
Oprah and Stedman have long been plagued by speculation as to why they never tied the knot after they first began dating 31 years ago in 1986.
The two were even rumored to be engaged in November 1992 but never actually planned a ceremony.
Oprah shared a pretty similar take on why she and Stedman never married in an interview with Essence magazine during a 2003 interview with the publication, revealing again that her longtime partner’s ideas about marriage were too “traditional” for them to ever make a marriage work and that divorce would have been almost certain.
“The truth of the matter is, had we gotten married we wouldn’t be together now, because in no way is this a traditional relationship,” she said at the time, hinting again that they more than likely wouldn’t still be together today had they walked down the aisle and tied the knot to become husband and wife.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ptBBNIZXtI
But while marriage was never for them, Oprah has only continued to gush over her non-traditional relationship with Stedman in the past. She’s claimed that it was because they never made things official that their more than three-decade long romance has worked as well as it has.
“The reason why this relationship has worked as well as it has is that we each got to define ourselves in it and not in a traditional form,” she told Piers Morgan during a sit-down interview on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight in 2011.
“There’s nothing about it that’s traditional,” continued Oprah six years ago. “I am a different kind of woman in that I am pretty assured that had I married I wouldn’t have remained married.”
Stedman has mainly stayed out of the spotlight when it comes to his relationship with the media mogul, only making rare appearances with the star at events and on red carpets and appearing very intermittently on her social media pages.
His last appearance on Oprah’s Instagram account happened back in May when she shared a sweet picture of the two together while celebrating a graduation.
[Featured Image by Jason Merritt/Getty Images]
