How Chrissy Teigen and John Legend Fell in Love
Ah, celebrity love stories. They’re just like our own stories of romance, except a lot more fancy (and often quite a bit more convoluted). Take Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, for example. The pair met on the set of Legend’s 2007 music video “Stereo,” when Teigen came in to star in the trippy, animated short film. And for the record, it definitely was not love at first sight.
Though some might assume that Legend and Teigen have been ga-ga about each other since day one, since they exhibit such serious #relationshipgoals these days, that was definitely not the case. “Not right away,” Legend, 35, told L.A. Confidential of the process of falling in love. “I’m more cautious than that. I wasn’t like, ‘This is the woman I’m going to marry’ from day one. For me I’m the kind of person who needs to grow into that feeling. It was probably a couple of years in when I could already see us being together forever.”
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We all know how that story played out—spoiler alert: they’re married—but how did they go from collaborating on “Stereo” to dating? Well, as it turns out: It all began with a fling .”I’m not going to lie. We hooked up” after the “Stereo” shoot, Teigen told Cosmo.
After that, Legend went on tour, and the two texted and talked on the phone for about a year. “I let him be himself for a while,” she said. “The worst thing you can do is try to lock someone like that down early on, then have them think, There’s so much more out there. I played it cool for a long time. Never once did I ask, ‘What are we?’ Marriage was never my goal, because I’ve never been very traditional. I was just happy to be with him.”
Slowly but surely, that year apart turned into a relationship. “I fell in love with her over the phone because she is good with those 140 characters,” Legend joked to ET. “[At the beginning of our relationship] we were texting a lot, and I started to see her sense of humor. We would talk on the phone, and I started to fall in love with how engaging and witty and funny she is.”
When his tour was over, they began dating in earnest. After all the texting and talking, “I think that’s when I really started to know that this was the kind of person I wanted to be around a lot,” Legend told ET. “Once we started spending more time together between tour stops and all this other stuff, we realized we had such a connection—and then it blossomed into a marriage and a baby.”
Because John Legend is John Legend, he proposed to Teigen during a Christmastime trip to the Maldives in 2011. On the beach. Of course. “There was no big grand speech or anything, it was just very lovely and sweet,” Teigen said on the now-defunct show “FABLife.”
The pair married on September 14, 2013 in Lake Como, Italy. The location had special significance for Teigen and Legend, because it was where Teigen once wished she would spend the rest of her life with Legend. “Back to where it all began – Lake Como, Italy – first came here in 2007,” Teigen posted on Instagram last year, alongside an uber romantic pic of a little bridge.
“A boat tour guide took us to a little spot on the lake and told us to make a wish,” she wrote. “I asked for this to be the man I marry and have children with. I think John asked for the most perfect bite of cacio e pepe. Both came true, and here we are.” The sweetest.
The beautiful couple also spent time in Lake Como when they shot the music video for “All of Me” a few years ago. “I love it when songs are authentic and come out of what an artist really wants to say,” songwriter Toby Gad, who collaborated on “All of Me” with Legend, told L.A. Confidential. “I feel the same way about my wife as he does about Chrissy, so we both felt passionately about what we were writing.”
Teigen and Legend’s most recent chapter in their love story is the birth of their beyond adorable baby, Luna Simone Stephens, last year on April 14. A whole book could be written on the cuteness that ensued when Luna was born, but suffice it to say that she looks exactly like Legend, she has been known to be lulled to sleep to the sound of Legend’s own ballads, and Legend and Teigen have resolved to learn to swim since she was born. Doesn’t get much cuter than that.
