Gabrielle Union Opens Up About the ‘Trauma’ of Dwyane Wade’s Having a Baby With Another Woman

Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade are one of Twitter's favorite couples, but they've had their fair share of struggles. And in a new essay for Time, Union opens up about a particularly difficult period for the pair: when Wade had a child with another woman in 2013, while he and the Being Mary Jane star were briefly broken up. (They first met in 2007 and confirmed their romance in 2012.)

The experience was a trying one for Union, as she was experiencing difficulty getting pregnant herself. The actor has adenomyosis, a form of endometritis that often causes infertility. She's gone through IVF and has had several miscarriages. In 2018 she and Wade welcomed a baby via surrogate.

But in regards to what happened five years before that, Union wrote for Time, “In 2013, before we were married, Dwyane had a baby with another woman. It should go without saying that we were not in a good place at the time that child was conceived. But we were doing much better when he finally told me about the pregnancy. To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience. There are people—strangers I will never meet—who have been upset that I have not previously talked about that trauma. I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy I am not sure I have them now.”

She continued, “The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily—while I was unable to—left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind.”

Eventually, the couple was able to find their way back to each other and are now in a happy marriage with a beautiful family. “Each day, he had worked to be forgiven, and I had chosen to do so,” she wrote. “And part of this journey of making peace with our love is also making peace with ourselves. I had come to accept that without that awful collision in our lives—this Big Bang moment in our relationship that set our galaxy as we knew it—we wouldn’t have become the individuals we wanted to be.”