Aug. 15 (UPI) — Oprah Winfrey says marrying longtime love Stedman Graham would have ultimately led to divorce.
The 63-year-old media mogul explained in the September issue of Vogue why she never tied the knot with Graham, her partner of over 30 years.
“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?’ And the answer is: ‘We wouldn’t be together,'” Winfrey told the magazine.
“We would not have stayed together, because marriage requires a different way of being in this world,” she said. “His interpretation of what it means to be a husband and what it would mean for me to be a wife would have been pretty traditional, and I would not have been able to fit into that.”
Winfrey shared similar sentiments in an interview with Access Hollywood in 2013 after attending Tina Turner‘s wedding to Erwin Bach the same year.
“Tina was like, ‘Oprah, you need to do this. You need to do it,'” the star recalled of Turner’s urging. “And I was just thinking, ‘Well, okay, would things really be different?’ And no, I don’t think so.”
“If you ever interviewed [Stedman], he would tell you that had we married, we wouldn’t not be together today. Because he’s a traditional man and this is a very untraditional relationship,” she explained.
Winfrey is instead focused on a number of projects, including executive producing the OWN series “Greenleaf” and “Queen Sugar.” She will also return to television in September as a special contributor on “60 Minutes.”
“It’s me being out in the center of the country doing that thing where you’re putting two sides together, and I am really looking forward to it,” the television personality told Vogue.
