Since proposing to Slade Smiley in 2013, Gretchen Rossi has repeatedly expressed her content with riding the “forever engagement” train. But now that their daughter, Skylar Gray Smiley, is older, Gretchen is giving more thought to walking down the aisle again.
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The Real Housewives of Orange County friend explained her position during an interview with the Orange County Register, admitting her and Slade’s wedding plans may be back on the table.
“It’s all brought back up again,” she said about the marriage topic. “Everyone’s asking us, so maybe this is the time to do it. Skylar is of an age where she can truly understand it… She can be our flower girl.”
Gretchen Rossi says her lengthy engagement is “a beautiful thing”
Gretchen said the decade-plus engagement underscored the strength of her and Slade’s relationship, as they didn’t need legal documents to prove their mutual commitment.
“I will say, what’s interesting to me is I feel like there’s something to be said about two people choosing every day to wake up and stay together, rather than people that want to put so much emphasis on, ‘Oh, you have to have a marriage license,’” she explained. “To me, it proves something more that you don’t have a marriage license and you’re choosing to stay together because you want to be together. I actually think it’s a beautiful thing that Slade and I have been able to show that we’re in love and we’re together because we want to be, not because we have to be.”
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Gretchen Rossi says she and Slade Smiley were never against marriage
Gretchen proposed to Slade in RHOC Season 8, which marked her final season as a full-time housewife. Although the Michigan native said she would be perfectly happy with a permanent engagement, she wasn’t opposed to getting married again. Gretchen revealed that she and Slade had previously selected a wedding date, but they had to scrap those plans because the timing wasn’t right.
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“So there really isn’t any like, ‘Oh, we’re not getting married.’ I don’t think that’s ever been our intent,” she told the outlet. “It’s been more about circumstantial situations. When we first put a date on a calendar, we didn’t realize the date we had picked was a holiday weekend, and a lot of our families were not available, had already booked a trip or whatever. And then Slade ended up getting booked for a miniseries with the History Channel down in Mexico for multiple months that interfered with the date as well.”
Gretchen Rossi explains why she and Slade Smiley have yet to tie the knot
As the years passed, Gretchen became increasingly serious about starting a family and chose to prioritize her pregnancy over a wedding.
“By the time we figure out this wedding crap, I’m probably not even going to be able to have a child anymore,” she recalled thinking. “So we decided to put our efforts and our money into IVF and try to have a child, because he had had a vasectomy 15 years earlier, and we knew we probably had to do IVF.”
After welcoming her daughter in 2019, Gretchen began experiencing “massive postpartum depression,” which lasted for roughly three years. She said the experience led her to halt her wedding plans.
“I felt overweight and I didn’t feel good,” she said. “My mind, you have a newborn, you’re not sleeping, you’re angry, all the stuff. So it wasn’t about, ‘I don’t want to get married,’ it was just circumstantial stuff.”
Learn more about Gretchen’s family life and why she’s “legitimately scared” for Skylar to become a teenager.
