One of the most influential Black women and talk show hosts, Oprah Winfrey has been in a relationship for about three decades now. Winfrey and her partner Stedman Graham have been together for the past 38 years but never got married. Over the years, rumors of the couple tying the knot have surfaced many times, but they have always been shut down by the two.
Surprisingly, the couple did get engaged once back in the 90s but called it off a year later. This means that the couple wasn’t really against marriage. So why did Winfrey and Graham never marry even after being the perfect couple? Let’s find out.
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Why Oprah Winfrey Never Married Stedman Graham
Although the couple has been together for more than three decades, powerful billionaire Oprah Winfrey decided to stay unmarried. “We would not have stayed together, because marriage requires a different way of staying in this world,” Winfrey said in an interview with Vogue in 2017. She further added, “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.“
However, Stedman Graham did propose to Winfrey to marry him in 1992. This happened while Winfrey was hanging out with her best friend Gayle King at her Indiana farmhouse when Graham suddenly popped the question. But after saying yes, Winfrey soon realized that she didn’t want to be married. She wanted to be asked by Graham, to know if he felt she was worthy of being his missus but did not want the commitment of marriage.
Her work was her priority, which would not have been possible to maintain in a traditional marriage. Hence they both decided that it would be better for them to stay just the way they were.
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How Did Oprah And Stedman Meet?
Oprah Winfrey and Stedman Graham met him for the first time in 1986 while visiting a mutual friend who was sick. In a 2020 article for O Magazine that she penned down, Winfrey wrote, “I thought he was nice enough, but I wasn’t that impressed. He was polite, yes, and kind. The sort of guy who sits with an ailing friend. Tall and handsome, for sure. But actually too handsome, I thought, to be interested in me.“
Later that year, after getting to know each other for some time, Winfrey and Graham started dating.
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