Singer Shania Twain Found The 'Courage To Love Again' After First Husband Cheated

Apr 06, 2022 by apost team

Shania Twain is a Canadian singer and songwriter who has sold over 100 million records throughout her career. This makes her the best-selling female country music artist of all time and one of the top-selling artists in music history. She has come to be known as the "Queen of Country Pop" and is best known for her songs "Man, I Feel Like a Woman" and "Any Man of Mine." The singer won a Grammy Award for the latter song.

Twain collaborated with producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange after her debut album turned out to be a commercial failure. With Lange's help, Twain's second album, titled "The Woman in Me," raised the star to fame and made her one of the most popular country singers at the time. Her third album, "Come On Over," became the best-selling studio album by a woman in any genre and the best-selling country album of all time. The album earned the singer four Grammy awards.

Twain has many accolades and accomplishments under her belt, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and on Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also the only female artist in history to have three consecutive albums certified Diamond by the RIAA.

In many of her songs, Twain sings about love and heartbreak – something that the country singer is all too familiar with. She was cheated on by Lange, who was not only her producer but also her husband. Fortunately, Twain kept her heart open and found love once again with a very unlikely man.

Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards on Aug. 28, 1965, in Windsor, Ontario. Her biological parents are Sharon and Clarence Edwards, but they divorced when the singer was two, and her mother remarried to a man named Jerry Twain. Jerry adopted Shania and her sisters Jill and Carrie Ann. Sharon and Jerry had a son named Mark and adopted Jerry's nephew Darryl after his mother passed away. 

Twain's family did not have a lot of money when she was growing up, so she began singing at bars at the age of eight to try to help pay her family's bills. The star has also shared that she witnessed a lot of violence between her mother and stepfather growing up. She graduated from Timmins High School in June 1983 and moved out to pursue a career in music. 

Tragically, on Nov. 1, 1987, Twain's mother and stepfather were killed in a car accident, and the singer moved back home to care for her younger brothers. "I knew I had to look after my younger brothers," she once explained. "I really needed to keep the family together. I just put all my singing ambitions on hold until the rest of the family had grown up."

When speaking with the Independent about that challenging time in her life, Twain said, "I had a lot of responsibility. I had to grow up fast." In the same interview with the Independent, Twain described her songwriting process, saying, "It's a very emotional experience. I often start in a melancholy place, and then I spin it around and turn it into a happy song."

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Twain later revealed that she was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease in 2003, and developed dysphonia, which causes paralysis of the vocal muscles. This set her back for a while and forced the singer to take a break from performing or recording new music.

The damage from the disease changed the way Twain's voice sounds. "I had to come to terms with losing the voice that I had," she told Closer Weekly in June 2019. "When you're a singer and it's your voice, it is just a terrible, terrible feeling. What I've learned through therapy is how to manipulate my voice to get it to do what I want it to do, or at least close enough."

Speaking with the Guardian, Twain explained how she had wanted a break to spend time with her family but was not expecting it to be so long and from an illness. "I did want a break," she said. "But, of course, I would have never stayed away 15 years. I was too embarrassed to tell anybody that I couldn't sing. For a long time, I didn't even know why I couldn't sing."

This wasn't the only hardship Twain encountered during her career. She married her producer, Lange, in December 1993 and welcomed a son in August 2001. Afterward, many of Twain's songs continued to share her personal stories, including her romance with Lange, as she released more top hits. One of her most recognized songs during this time was "You're Still the One," a song that is still incredibly popular to this day.

However, in May 2008, Twain and Lange announced that they were separating as Lange had had an affair. Not only that, but the affair had allegedly been with Twain and Lange's personal assistant and close friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud, according to the Guardian. Twain later spoke about how she had written songs about her "cheating friend" that expressed how much she "hated her." Twain and Lange's divorce was finalized in June 2010.

While many people would be completely heartbroken and devastated at the fact that their partner cheated on them, Twain stayed hopeful that she would find love again. She also stayed strong for the sake of her son, Eja, and revisited her past to help put everything in her life in context, according to the Guardian.

Fortunately, Twain didn't have to look very far to find the man she was destined to be with, as he was someone that was already in her circle. According to the Guardian, Twain had gotten together with Thiébaud's husband, Frédéric, a Swiss Nestlé executive. The two were reportedly engaged around December 2010 and married in January 2011.

Speaking with People in 2020, Twain said:

"I'm so grateful I found the faith and courage to love again – because the last thing you want to do when you're crushed is love again. When you have a great loss, you lose faith; you get very discouraged. I'm sure a lot of people will say, 'I'm never going to love again. I never want to fall in love again.' Songs have been written about that. I'm really glad that that got turned around for me, and that's what this relationship is."

Did you know about Shania Twain's relationship history? What's your favorite song by her? Let us know, and be sure to pass this along to your loved ones, too!