Thomas Rhett is admitting to once “living a double life” that almost ruined his marriage.
“I look through my life and I think about all the things that have kind of twisted me or made me like not the best person to be around, and it has always been either around affirmation or lack of affirmation,” the country star told Sadie Robertson Huff on her “WHOA That’s Good” podcast.
The “Die a Happy Man” singer, who appeared on the podcast with his wife, Lauren Akins, said that at the height of his fame, he experienced “the most affirmation I think I’d ever received in my life. And I really liked it.”
But he admitted that he didn’t feel he handled his marriage very well at the time.
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“I look back at our life during that time, and I’m not — I don’t think I stewarded it very well, to be honest with you,” Rhett said. “I think I wanted to try some things better just to make her — It was all at the sake of making her happy. And this was back in the time when I thought I actually could make my wife happy.”
He said there are “moments I think that I can, but if I look at myself as the pure sole source of her happiness, I’m going to always let her down,” adding that it took him a decade to “truly learn that both of our sources of happiness comes from” God.
“Like joy comes from the Lord and there are things that we can do for each other that bring each other joy,” he said. “But at the truest self of your heart, if you can’t learn that true joy comes from the Lord, then you’re always going to be searching for something that makes you happy.”
At that time, he said he was trying to be successful “at all costs.”
Fast-forwarding to a year later, he said he and Akins were about to have their first biological child and were also adopting a child from Uganda.
The couple, who first met in the first grade, married in 2012.
He said he “was the most spiritually unhealthy human being” at the time.
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Publicly, he said he kept up a façade of spirituality, “but internally I was dying. Like I genuinely, I just liked what was happening so much that I think so much of me was being sucked into the world so hard that it just kept pushing me and her like this,” he said, moving his hands away from each other.
Rhett noted that he and his wife said from “day one, divorce is not an option,” but “the more you actually think about it, anything is actually an option if you let it become that.”
He said when they were around 25 to 26 years old, “I was living a double life.”
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Rhett explained that around that time they were living for a year in Uganda while Akins was pregnant, and he was traveling for work all the time.
“I’m playing a show in Arizona, and then I’m traveling back to Uganda, and then I’m going to New York, and I’m going back to Uganda,” he said. “Like I can never actually settle anywhere.”
It wasn’t until 2020 that he said he “actually discovered bits and pieces of who I actually was at my core, without a microphone, without a stage with and without affirmation, because it was the first time it had ever been taken away from me, if that makes any sense.”
In the last five years, he said, “Jesus has chiseled on my heart more” than he can remember.
“I’m not perfect,” he continued. “I’ll never be perfect, but I would say, like today, us looking at each other and being a married couple, I would say this is — I’m living my most true self now.”
He pointed to his wife, saying, “She always sort of has been” living her true self, to which Akins modestly balked.
“It’s just such a peaceful feeling,” he added.
Akins admitted earlier in the podcast that she hates the spotlight.
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She said in a roomful of people she knows, she feels comfortable, but if it’s not a “safe place” for her, she feels very out of her “comfort zone.”
“We couldn’t be more opposite,” she explained. “He’s been in every single talent show that’s ever existed since we were little kids and the lead in all the musicals, and it just — we’re so opposite.”
But she said whenever she’s out of her comfort zone with Rhett, she knows “he’s going to hold my hand and get me out on the other side. I may not be totally unscathed, but yeah, it’s always been worth it.”
Having grown up with faith, she said, “Your brain knows the truth, but it’s one thing to, like, know truth and to be able to speak truth, but to believe and walk in truth are two very different things.”
She added that she felt Rhett had given both of them the gift of “pushing us out of our comfort zones in very different ways. And it’s not what I wanted to do, but I see his faithfulness through all of it … I love adrenaline, adventure. I’m here for all of that.”
Akins said she never dreamed of what her life has become: “The family that we have, the life that we live now. I’m like truly — I told him just a few months ago, like through tears, I’m like ‘Every dream I ever dreamed as a little girl, like it has already happened and come true. Like I’m there. I’m living every bit of it, and I feel so unbelievably grateful even through all the tears and the hard moments, like he truly does just pay attention to our hearts and wants to care for us and wants to love us and show how much he loves us.”
