Actress-producer-author Gabrielle Union is opening up about forgiving Dwyane Wade after he fathered a child with another woman during a break from their relationship.
In her new book, You Got Anything Stronger?, Union writes: “To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience. I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy, I am not sure I have them now. But truth matters.”
She notes the couple was “not in a good place” in their relationship when Wade fathered a child — Xavier, 7 — with former Basketball Wives star Aja Metoyer in 2013. She said their relationship was doing better when he broke the news that he was expecting a child.
“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,” Union recalled. “We gathered what we could to slowly remake me into something new. There was no way to disguise where I’d been glued back together.”
In an excerpt reprinted on E! Online, she wrote, “Each day, he had worked to be forgiven, and I had chosen to love him and forgive him. And part of this journey of making peace with our love is also making peace with ourselves.”
The Bring It On star maintained that if the couple had not experienced the struggles they did, Wade “wouldn’t have become the man he desperately wanted to be, and I would not become the woman I dreamed of being.”
Union’s new book, You Got Anything Stronger, which was released Tuesday, is a follow-up to her 2017 New York Times bestseller, We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated and True. In it, she discusses her marriage and her surrogacy journey that resulted in the birth of her daughter, Kaavia James Union Wade, now 2 years old.
As previously reported, in a book excerpt recently printed in Time magazine, Union shared that she was advised toward surrogacy after an adenomyosis diagnosis and many miscarriages. She said the decision was difficult because she desperately wanted to experience being pregnant, and she admits she wanted to be publicly pregnant.
“The question lingers in my mind: I will always wonder if Kaav would love me more if I had carried her,” she writes. “Would our bond be even tighter? I will never know what it would have been like to carry this rockstar inside me.”
Yet, she adds that in “telling the fullness of our stories, of our three lives together, I must tell the truths I live with. And I have learned that you can be honest and loving at the same time.”
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