Oprah Winfrey, the legendary television host, and producer, is well-known for her charismatic personality and compassion. However, she has never married or had children during her long television career. She spoke about her decision to not marry in 2019 in an interview with People magazine. The billionaire mogul reveals her views on motherhood and why she never married her longtime partner, Stedman Graham.
She told the outlet that she did think of becoming a mother when she got engaged to Graham. She said, “At one point in Chicago I had bought an additional apartment because I was thinking, ‘Well, if we get married, I’m going to need room for children.’ ” However, that did not happen because Winfrey saw “the depth of responsibility and sacrifice that is actually required to be a mother” while hosting The Oprah Winfrey Show.
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The 68-year-old added, “I realized, ‘Whoa, I’m talking to a lot of messed-up people, and they are messed up because they had mothers and fathers who were not aware of how serious that job is.’ I don’t have the ability to compartmentalize the way I see other women do.”
She insisted, “It is why, throughout my years, I have had the highest regard for women who choose to be at home [with] their kids, because I don’t know how you do that all day long. Nobody gives women the credit they deserve.” She continued, “I used to think about this all the time, that I was working these 17-hour days, and so were my producers, and then I go home and I have my two dogs and I have Stedman, who’s letting me be who I need to be in the world. He’s never demanding anything from me like, ‘Where’s my breakfast? Where’s my dinner?’ Never any of that, which I believed would have changed had we married.”
She said that both she and Graham now believe that if they had married, they wouldn’t be together now. The Academy Award winner added, “No question about it — we would not stay married, because of what that would have meant to him, and I would have had my own ideas about it.”
Winfrey wrote in a column for the February issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, “In 1993, the moment after I said yes to his proposal, I had doubts. I realized I didn’t actually want a marriage. I wanted to be asked. I wanted to know he felt I was worthy of being his missus, but I didn’t want the sacrifices, the compromises, the day-in-day-out commitment required to make a marriage work. My life with the show was my priority, and we both knew it.”
The Emmy Award winner says that she doesn’t regret her decision to not marry and have children. She explained, “I have not had one regret about that. I also believe that part of the reason why I don’t have regrets is because I got to fulfill it in the way that was best for me: the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. Those girls fill that maternal fold that I perhaps would have had. In fact, they overfill — I’m overflowed with maternal.”