John Legend may be the consummate family man these days, but there was definitely a time in his life where he was more of a ladies man. And it started a lot earlier than many might have expected.
It’s no surprise to imagine a world-famous musician having sexual opportunity thrown at their feet day in and day out, it’s part of the fairy tale lifestyle after all. But for Legend, he didn’t even have to wait until he was a musician.
All he had to do was grow up.
According to the EGOT winner, it all started pretty much as soon as he was old enough to start getting that attention. It helps that People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” is — well, sexy. What happened next, though, was all ego.
Legend opened up about it during an appearance on the “Armchair Expert” podcast with hosts Monica Padman and Dax Shepard. In particular, it was Shepard who brought the topic up, admitting to his own “f–king deplorable” past with cheating.
He said it was all the songs about the topic throughout Legend’s music that made him wonder about it.
“I think what happened for me, you go through a lot of your life in your teens and I was younger than everybody in high school and college, and so I just didn’t get a lot of girls,” Legend said. “When I started to get that attention, I loved it.”
Homeschooled through his early years, Legend was able to skip two grades before he attended high school and college, thus putting him markedly behind most of his peers socially and developmentally during those formative years.
Legend tried to logic his way around his behavior, though, saying, “I escaped ‘technically cheating’ by keeping my relationship ill-defined. But it was really cheating.”
“I definitely was dishonest and selfish,” Legend continued. And this was before fame came calling. By the time he was in his mid-20s, Legend’s life started to change as his music career was taking off and he says he absolutely took advantage of it.
But all that time lying to these women about other women, and in a way lying to himself by keeping those relationships “ill-defined,” as he put it, clearly started weighing on him. Or maybe some of it was just growing up.
“At a certain point, you just realize you’re happier being honest,” he said. “You’re happier being faithful and being in love with one person.” For Legend, his person was Chrissy Teigen.
The couple met in 2006 when she starred in his “Stereo” music video. Five years later they were engaged and now enjoy two children together, Luna and Miles.
“At a certain point, I just decided that person was Chrissy,” he said. “I decided I wasn’t gonna mess with somebody else anymore.”
By that he means that things didn’t even start off monogamous between the pair. Admitting they had sex that first night, Legend also noted, “We were both seeing other people at the time. There was kind of a looseness at the very beginning, but we fell in love not long after that.”
The singer stated that coming clean and living his life more honestly has been great. “It’s so much easier, your whole life is lighter,” he said. “Your mind is freer, everything is better.”
But he also joked that there is one other reason he’d never dare go back to his cheating ways.
“Chrissy has 12 million Twitter followers,” he said. “If I were to do anything, it would be career suicide. It would be terrible.”
He’s not wrong.
