Chip and Joanna Gaines are the couple that almost never was.
In the summer issue of the couple’s Magnolia Journal, the cookbook author reveals Chip was not exactly the man of her dreams when they first met.
“It wasn’t love at first sight for Chip and me,” she wrote. “For one thing, I was typically attracted to guys who were more on the quiet side. Based on our first date, it was clear that Chip was anything but quiet. He was all over the place, talking about the businesses he’d started, and these ideas he had, and how he was buying up little houses and flipping them, and I was wondering if he was just a bit crazy.
"In my mind, I somewhat instinctively checked his penchant for risk and chatty nature as two reasons we probably wouldn’t go on a second date.”
While it looked like the pair would go their separate ways, something about Chip piqued Joanna’s interest, particularly how he envisioned his life.
“All the ideas and dreams he held for himself were anything but ordinary, and he talked about the world around him through the lens of untapped potential,” he wrote. “When Chip did eventually stop talking, if only to take a breath, I found myself wanting to fill the silence with plans and dreams of my own.
"Ideas that I kept close and half-baked for fear that I didn’t have what it would take to turn them into realities. Dreams that I knew required the heart of a risk taker, a quality I’d long considered to be one I simply didn’t possess.”
Joanna said Chip’s ideas brought something out that was buried in her.
“Somehow those aspirations felt real, achievable even, in Chip’s company. This near-stranger had drawn out a side of me that I didn’t yet know existed. My gut told me there was something there worth waiting for. Our lives have beat to this same rhythm ever since,” she wrote.
Things definitely appear to have worked out. The former “Fixer Upper” stars met in 2001, married in 2003 and have since built up their Magnolia empire.
They are also now parents to five kids — Drake, 15, Ella, 13, Duke, 11, Emmie, 10, and Crew, 1 — and recently let TODAY in on how they are coping with the quarantine.
“Times like this just shifts everything and puts everything in perspective,” Joanna said. “I think that, for me, the idea that we get these extra hours and these moments with each other and with our kids, I’m learning more and more. As much as I already thought I knew, I’m learning even more.”