BY NAJA RAYNE
Shonda Rhimes and Oprah Winfrey have something in common – their reluctance to get married.
“I was able to finally stand up and say, ‘I don’t want to get married.’ At all,” Rhimes, 45, told Winfery during an episode of SuperSoul Sunday. “I said that out loud. I said it to my family. I said it to my friends. I said it to anybody who asked. It’s never been a dream of mine. ”
From there, the two prolific women continue to discuss the pressure put on women of a certain age to walk down the aisle. The Scandal creator explains to Winfrey that the expectation for women to get married is very similar to the expectation to have children.
“It’s a lot like the desire to want to have children in our society,” she said. “You’re supposed to want it, and if you don’t want it, what’s wrong with you?”
While she makes the comparison, Rhimes also points out that she’s always known she wanted children, but never felt that way about getting married.
“I’m one of those people, since I was 5, I could tell you I was going to have kids. I could tell you I was going to have three. I could tell you they were going to be girls,” she added. “But I have never wanted to get married. I never played bride. I was never interested. I don’t know what it is; I never wanted to get married.”
Not so surprisingly, Winfrey, 61, shared the same sentiments as the mother-of-three.
The media mogul explained that she felt like she always wanted someone to want to marry her, but when the opportunity presented itself, and longtime boyfriend Stedman Graham proposed, Winfrey realized she didn’t necessarily want marriage.
“The moment he asked me to marry him, I was like ‘Oh, God! Now I actually have to get married?'” Oprah said about the wedding that she and Graham agreed to postpone, but never spoke about again. “But what I realized is, I don’t want to be married.
“Because I could not have the life that I created for myself. I couldn’t do it.”
Rhimes agreed with Winfrey, adding that admitting their lack of desire for marriage out loud provides some sort of freedom from what she felt was “a dirty little secret.”
“It was really freeing to say it out loud,” Rhimes said.
Read more on Oprah.com.
