Divorces.
Breakups.
Fathering a child with another woman.
Infertility struggles.
Incredible support and perseverance.
Surely, it hasn't always been smooth sailing for Gabrielle Union and Dwayne Wade, but the
couple worked through all the obstacles and came out stronger than ever.
In today’s video, we’re taking a closer look at their solid union.
Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade crossed paths for the first time in 2007.
Both hired by promoters to host a Super Bowl party, the pair met professionally while Dwyane
was still married to his ex Siohvaughn Wade, whom he filed for divorce from four months
later.
Gabrielle, on the other hand, had just divorced her ex Chris Howard a year earlier.
Around the same time, rumors began to heat up that the NBA star was secretly dating the
actress.
And they didn’t even TALK at the event.
“I stayed on one side of the room with my people,” Gabrielle said.
“We like to party, and he doesn’t drink at all.
He was on the other side of the room holding bible study.”
After dodging dating rumors for a few years, the lovebirds took their relationship public
by attending the 2010 Summer Groove charity event as a couple and posing for photos.
However, behind the scenes, Wade faced a bitter custody and divorce battle with his ex-wife.
Funches even named Union in a lawsuit, claiming the actress engaged in “sexual foreplay”
with Dwyane in front of their children.
Wade continually denied the accusations by his soon-to-be ex.
She then started hitting them with multiple lawsuits.
Siohvaughn sued Gabrielle for “emotional distress,” but the case was dismissed.
“My life is just too easy to track.
So, we were submitting plenty of proof for the times she said I was in Miami.
So, it was like, obviously, you’re not telling the truth.
And then the courts dismissed the case,” said Gabrielle at the time.
A year after Dwyane was awarded sole custody of his children Zaire and Zaya and his ex
dropped the lawsuits, Dwyane and Gabrielle appeared on the cover of Essence together.
However, at the time, neither of them had marriage in mind.
“We’re not rushing it,” Dwyane told the magazine.
“Both of us have been married before, and we understand that if we choose to marry again,
we want it to be right.
We both took failing at marriage hard.
The next time, it’s gotta be forever.”
Throughout Dwyane’s divorce proceedings, the lawsuits against Gabrielle, and the rumors
that the actress broke up Dwyane and Funches’ marriage, Gabrielle remained silent, opting
to take the high road.
In 2012, she finally opened up: “I think people mistook me taking the high
road as an admission of guilt.
Dwyane and I made a decision very early to not react to the negativity.”
Sadly, in early 2013, when their work schedules became too overwhelming, the couple decided
to separate.
Looking back on this period, Gabrielle told Glamour that she couldn’t take time off,
and she missed some “quality togetherness we desperately needed.”
Moving forward, she decided that her work schedule has to make sense for their family.
The lovebirds reconciled after a few months apart.
Over the summer, Union reassessed her priorities.
“I’d always wanted an awesome career with back-to-back projects, but I realized I wasn’t
willing to sacrifice my relationship for it.”
However, the couple had yet to go through one of the most challenging times in their
relationship.
While on a break from the actress, Wade welcomed a son with another woman.
In his 2020 ESPN documentary, D. Wade: Life Unexpected, he admitted that telling Union
he was expecting a child with someone else was the “hardest thing” he’s ever done.
“I couldn’t sleep.
I wasn’t eating.”
The actress discussed the experience, which she said left her “devastated”, in her
book ​You Got Anything Stronger?.
“I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy I am not sure I have them
now,” she wrote.
She reflected on the pain she felt over her husband’s ability to have a child with another
woman while she struggled over the decision of whether to try a drug that could increase
her chances of carrying a child to 30 per cent, or surrogacy.
According to Union, Wade had encouraged her not to attempt the drug, with the actor recalling
how the former NBA star had told her “You’ve done enough”.
However, rather than comfort her, her husband’s words had instead “sounded like an acknowledgment
of failure”.
“Because at that point I would have sold my soul to get out of the endless cycle of
loss.
What was the going rate for souls?
What was mine worth, anyway?
The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily - while I was unable to - left my soul
not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind,”
she wrote.
Union also recalled how her feelings about surrogacy were impacted by her feelings for
her husband, with the actor explaining that she felt she “needed to let Dwyane go”
if she wasn’t going to “submit to a surrogacy”.
“Even if he didn’t want to, I had to let him find someone who could give him what he
wanted,” she wrote of her thoughts at the time.
While Gabrielle ultimately decided to stay with Dwayne, both out of love, forgiveness,
and “fear of public humiliation,” she admitted that she may not have made the same
decision today.
However, according to Union, she also recognizes the moment as a defining point in their relationship,
which she noted likely played an impact in shaping her into the person she is today.
“I had come to accept that without that awful collision in our lives - this Big Bang
moment in our relationship that set our galaxy as we knew it - we wouldn’t have become
the individuals we wanted to be,” she wrote.
She chose to "love him and forgive him" after Wade "worked to be forgiven" each day.
With the help of his kids, he then proposed to Gabrielle on December 21, 2013.
Together, the entire family held up signs that read: “Will you marry us?”
“I turn to D like, ‘Ugh, they just made some signs,’ and he’s down on one knee
— and he’s like, ‘Will you marry us?’
And I was like, ‘Oh, you’re serious!’”
After an eight-month engagement, the couple said “I do” at Chateau Artisan in Miami,
Florida.
She previously said that the wedding would include “no bridesmaids, no groomsmen.
It’s just us and the kids.
And we’re just riding out, just us.”
The wedding hashtag was appropriately and perfectly: #TheWadeUnion.
Right after the nuptials, the couple jetted off to the Maldives for an epic honeymoon.
After the couple tied the knot, Gabrielle constantly dodged questions about her fertility.
Finally, after four years of being hounded by the media, she revealed that they’ve
been struggling to conceive for years.
Union first opened up about her fertility struggles in 2017's "We’re Going to Need
More Wine," but the actress said all the nuance and pain she shared about her journey to motherhood
was simplified to a brief excerpt.
"It seemed every article about me used the phrase I had offered: 'I have had eight or
nine miscarriages,'" Union said.
"This was always followed closely by my age."
Not only did the media fixate on her age, Union said doctors didn't fully investigate
her "unexplained infertility" because she was an "older woman" in her 40s.
She was diagnosed in 2016 with a "pronounced" case of adenomyosis that likely started in
her 20s.
"There would be anger that I had sat in the offices of the world’s leading IVF doctors,
and all they saw was my age," Union wrote.
"There was no investigation into any other cause for my miscarriages, and I was never
correctly diagnosed or treated."
According to Mayo Clinic, adenomyosis occurs when the tissue that normally lines the uterus
grows into the muscular wall of the uterus.
Union said she felt "clarity, relief and grief" to have answers, but an endocrinologist she
was seeing told her, "I don't know how anyone would have missed this."
The couple welcomed their "miracle" daughter Kaavia by surrogate in 2018, but Union said
it took her over a year to "make peace" and accept the surrogacy route because she felt
like "a failure" for not carrying her herself.
Gabrielle later said that feeling has been replaced with gratitude and relief since Kaavia's
birth.
The actor plans to be very open about the fact the Kaavia was conceived via surrogacy
as her daughter grows up.
“We want her to know everything it took to bring her into this world, usually around
the time she starts talking back.
We want her to really understand what we went through,” Gabrielle told Oprah during their
special.
Union also opened up about why it's "important" for her and Dwyane to "love out loud" when
it comes to their family.
In 2019, Dwyane's then–12-year-old daughter, Zaya, came out as transgender.
Since then, Gabrielle and Dwyane have expressed their support for Zaya in many ways and opened
up about how her journey has enlightened them as parents.
"We didn't exactly understand why supporting Zaya's trans identity was a thing, because
it's like, we love all our kids out loud," Gabrielle told BuzzFeed.
"But it is a thing, and a lot of people do need an example.
They do need that representation of parenting."
"So yeah, we're gonna post our family," she said.
"We're going to live out loud, we're going to love out loud, and we're going to speak
out loud, and lead in however each situation calls for us to be leaders when things are
not where they should be."
People see Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade as the ultimate power couple.
There is definitely much more to the story, but we have to give these two credit for fighting
for their relationship during its most trying times.
Now, the pair is happier and stronger than ever.