Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady’s Ever-Winning Love Story

“I just thought like, I never met a guy that is so sweet, and so gentle and honorable. Just how he is, you know. That I felt like, ‘Oh, I think I have to really think about this,'” she reflected last year on Brady’s ESPN+ docuseries Man in the Arena. “If you’re choosing this, you’re choosing, you know, to have this child for the rest of your life, and his mom and all of this, you know, this is all gonna be part of your life.”

Brady, who like Bündchen grew up in a big, tight-knit family, admitted to Details in 2009, “That’s not how you envisioned your life, that’s not how you envisioned having children, but it happens…Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be—and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not. You go through life and you try the best you can.”

Talking to Vanity Fair at the time, Bündchen said, “I think it was a blessing, because otherwise I don’t think I would have known what he was made of, and he wouldn’t have known what I was made of. I wouldn’t have seen the integrity in him—the way he was a good person through all the times. I was like, You have the heart in a good place! It made me feel more in love with him; it made me realize who he was. Our relationship has become so much stronger, and I think I wouldn’t be as certain as I am today if it weren’t for that.”