Oprah Winfrey has been questioned for decades now on the status of her relationship with Stedman Graham, whom she’s been dating for nearly 30 years. She’s now finally breaking her silence on why she has ruled out marriage in her future.
During an interview she conducted with Shonda Rhimes for OWN’s Super Soul Sunday, Winfrey talked about this personal subject she’s never discussed before. She revealed she almost married Graham over 20 years ago, but they postponed the wedding and it was never brought up again.
“I don't know if I've ever said this publicly, but I really wanted to be wanted to be married to," she told Rhimes, Huffington Post reports. "I wanted Stedman to want to marry me. The moment he asked me to marry him I was, like... 'Now I actually have to get married?'"
But she revealed she did accept his proposal and they planned the wedding for the year 1993, around the same time she was supposed to do a book.
“The wedding and the book were happening around the same time,” she explained, and Graham didn’t want the “wedding disturbed by all these people asking me about the book (which I ended up not doing).”
"I said, 'OK. All right. So he said, 'We should just postpone this wedding. I said, 'OK.' And that was it. We have never discussed it again,” she revealed.
In the years following the postponement, Winfrey came to a big realization: “I don't want to be married.” Her reasoning is because “I could not have the life that I created for myself” and also be a wife. “I knew that I couldn't do it."