'Fixer Upper's Chip Gaines Talks About the Woman He Wanted to Marry Before Joanna
Before Chip Gaines met his wife, Joanna, who rose to fame with him on the HGTV series "Fixer Upper," he had his heart set on marrying another woman.
Aside from being business owners and reality TV stars, the Gaineses are magazine publishers of the Magnolia Journal. In the Fall issue that's now available, Chip wrote a piece about the woman he first thought he was going to marry whom he gave the pseudonym "Amy."
"Amy put up with me despite my terrible approach to relationships," Chip wrote in his description of the woman.
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Amy and Chip dated for two years, but he broke her heart when visiting her in London where she had relocated for a job. When Amy wanted to know where her relationship with Chip was going, he admitted to not handling the matter well.
"I, being a complete idiot, said something along the lines of 'You know, I've never given it much thought,'" he recalled, before realizing on his flight home that he actually wanted to make Amy his wife. "I felt convinced that Amy was the one. I walked off that plane hell-bent on making that young woman my wife."
In an effort to make things up to her, Chip asked Amy's parents for their permission to propose to her. They declined.
When she returned home to Texas, Chip recalled trying to build a wall for Amy with some leftover stone material from a project he finished working on. Although he left a note for her, Amy's roommates saw the structure and were afraid since it resembled a tombstone.
Despite his intentions to make things right, Amy's father wrote Chip a "very kind but stern letter that expressed his concerns over my level of persistence." That was the wake up call that Chip needed to stop pursuing the woman he once thought would be his wife.
"I really respected this man, and for the first time throughout this whole ordeal, I realized that even though my intentions were good, I had pushed this too far," Chip wrote.
While it didn't work out with Amy, Chip has been happily married to Joanna for the past 14 years and the couple are raising four children together.
"Jo and I both made a commitment pretty early on that the two of us are the most important variable," Chip told People magazine in a previous interview. "If we can figure out how to be right as a couple, then obviously we have a lot better opportunity to be right for our kids."
