Kenny Chesney shares rare glimpse into his ultra-private romantic life

In a rare and personal interview on CBS, Kenny Chesney spoke about his ultra-private love life over the weekend. The country music crooner detailed a time when he had a crush on a girl back in his student days at East Tennessee State University.  “She sat right beside me. I tried, I mean, it was six months [trying] to get her to go out with me,” he detailed. “I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna write her a song,” he added.  “This was the first song that I ever wrote, and it was trying to persuade — and ironically enough, it was in a communications class called Persuasion,” he added. The 57-year-old then recorded the song and hoped the girl would be impressed.  “I came in [like], ‘OK, this is it,'” he said. “She was sitting as far back in the corner of the room as she could sit.”

“That was my first taste of rejection in the music business and as a songwriter,” he explained. “But it went from there, yeah. You listen, you read, you observe people’s lives and you try to communicate that.”

Previously Kenny was married to Renee Zellweger who he cited as one of his top celebrity crushes in 2005.  “Here’s a country girl who’s still down to earth. You never see her coming, then – wham! – there she is,” he told The Tennessean.  

“And that makes her really, really sexy. Plus she seems like the kind of girl who could fit in and be at home anywhere.”

The two got together in 2005 and after four months of dating married in May, but after less than four months of marriage, Renee filed for divorce citing fraud. Speculation then swirled on what “fraud” meant, with many suggesting that she was relating to his sexuality.  “That made me sad,” 

Renee told The Advocate in 2016. “It made me sad that somehow people were using that as a way to be cruel and calling someone gay as a pejorative, which has fateful consequences. Of course, there’s the bigger-picture problem of why anyone had to make up a story at all.”

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Kenny then followed up with a statement of his own saying. “This is an incredibly sad time,” he said. “I just hope everyone can respect the privacy that I know Renée has already asked for.”

But the rumors continued and both Kenny and Renee were forced to respond with a joint statement:  “The miscommunication of the objective of their marriage at the start is the only reason for this annulment,” they stated. 

© Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Image

“Renée and Kenny value and respect each other and are saddened that their different objectives prevent the success of this marriage.”

Kenny then later appeared on The View and detailed how it all happened between them. “She and I fell in love like a couple of schoolkids,” he said. “I’m glad to know that can happen, that that exists and we still really care about each other. It would’ve been a bad thing if I hadn’t met her. She’s wonderful. I don’t want to sit here and go: ‘Poor me.’ I am totally blessed, and I’m grateful for it.”

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He also clarified his sexuality in another interview. “I think people need to live their lives the way they want to, but I’m pretty confident in the fact that I love girls,” he told Playboy. “I’ve got a long line of girls who could testify that I am not gay. In order for us to get an annulment, the legal papers could claim either physical abuse, which wasn’t true, or three or four other things that also weren’t true. The best thing we could put in there was fraud. So I said, ‘All right, do it. Whatever’.”