Gwen Stefani Recalls 'Chaos' of Early Days Dating Blake Shelton — and Telling Him 'This Is Not Happening' (Exclusive)

Stefani sings of her and Shelton's love story on her latest solo album, 'Bouquet' (out now)

Gwen Stefani is looking back on her love story with Blake Shelton.

The pop icon, 55, and the country superstar, 48, first got together in 2015, when they were working as coaches on The Voice — and they each weathering divorces after splitting from Gavin Rossdale and Miranda Lambert, respectively.

At the time, Stefani — who shares sons Kingston, 18, Zuma, 16, and Apollo, 10, with ex Rossdale — was hesitant to dive into another relationship, despite her feelings for Shelton.

"We had just met, and it was chaos. Both of our lives were in complete turmoil, all over the ground. Nothing could save us at that point," Stefani tells PEOPLE. "There was a point where I was like, 'I can't even talk to you. This is insane. I already have enough problems. This is not happening anymore. We're not going to text or nothing.'"

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Undeterred, Shelton eventually wooed Stefani back — with music.

"I think he really wanted to impress me, because he doesn't really write songs as much as he used to. And I love writing songs. That's everything to me. If I want to feel like I have any kind of purpose or any kind of value or anything, it's about writing a song. That's where I get my fulfillment," she says.

Shelton then began writing what would become "Go Ahead and Break My Heart," a country duet he and Stefani released in 2016.

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"He sent it to me, and it was a half-written song. He was like, 'Help me finish this.' So I wrote him the verse back — the second verse on the song — and it's just over text," she says. "That was our first song that we ever wrote together. We were never even in the same room, but we were writing a song to each other."

These days, Stefani and Shelton are partners in life, as well as duets. The pair got married in 2021.

“Something that I wanted since I was a little girl is to be married and have this love that I saw my parents have and have babies. That dream was completely ruined; it was crushed, and I had to figure out how I was going to move forward and make a new dream,” she says, “and God putting Blake in my life was just that miracle.”

Over the past nine years, the pair have also worked on several more songs together, including "Purple Irises," which appears on Stefani's new album Bouquet (out now).

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“We come from such different worlds. Our musical tastes are different, yet we do come together in this one place: We both love ’70s soft rock and yacht rock," she says, adding that when they got together: “We would always play this game, and we would put on a song and say, ‘Do you know this one?’ And it would always be these ’70s songs."

Their shared love of yacht rock ended up inspiring "Purple Irises," a romantic song about Shelton that became a duet and informed the direction of Bouquet as a whole.

“He loved the song so much, he was like, ‘Save that one,'" she recalls.