Joanna Gaines and Chip Gaines have been married for almost two decades. However, the 42-year-old designer didn't exactly fall head over heels with the 45-year-old house flipper when they first met.
Joanna told the whole story for Magnolia Journal's summer "Risk" issue.
"It wasn't love at first sight for Chip and me," theFixer Upperstar wrote in a note titled "Slow Yes." "For one thing, I was typically attracted to guys who were more on the quiet side. Based on our first date, it was clear that Chip was anything but quiet. He was all over the place, talking about the businesses he'd started, and these ideas he had, and how he was buying up little houses and flipping them, and I was wondering if he was just a bit crazy. In my mind, I somewhat instinctively checked his penchant for risk and chatty nature as two reasons we probably wouldn't go on a second date."
Still, there was something about Chip that "intrigued" her.
"All the ideas and dreams he held for himself were anything but ordinary, and he talked about the world around him through the lens of untapped potential," she continued. "When Chip did eventually stop talking, if only to take a breath, I found myself wanting to fill the silence with plans and dreams of my own. Ideas that I kept close and half-baked for fear that I didn't have what it would take to turn them into realities. Dreams that I knew required the heart of a risk taker, a quality I'd long considered to be one I simply didn't possess. Somehow those aspirations felt real, achievable even, in Chip's company."