Divorce is never easy, but in his memoir If You Would Have Told Me, John Stamos shares that the split between him and fellow actress Rebecca Romijn was particularly brutal.
According to Stamos, it took several years for him to recover after calling it quits with Romijn, even going so far as to admit he thought of the X-Men actress as the Devil for quite some time. “I just hated her,” he said in an exclusive interview with People. The healing process, while it did eventually come, was far from linear. “I was shattered for way too long,” he says.
The Hollywood pair met at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 1994 where Romijn was then modeling. They dated up until 1998 at which point they tied the knot in a formal wedding ceremony. The marriage lasted five full years until Stamos eventually filed for divorce in 2004.
The split surprised many in the industry, including actor John Travolta, with whom Romijn co-starred in The Punisher. “I’m a little surprised,” Travolta told USA Today at the movie premiere. Over the years, Stamos has rarely spoken out about the divorce, but in If You Would Have Told Me he not only explains how it impacted his life, but also why it happened.
The reason John Stamos and Rebecca Romijn got a divorce
As is customary with any relationship, the answer will defer depending on who you ask, at least to a small extent. When Stamos and Romijn parked the car and took the keys out of the ignition, the gossip around town was that the decision was due to differences in their career trajectories, and for the first time, Stamos corroborated that assumption in his interview with People.
“It was very much the opinion that she dumped me because her career was going great and mine wasn’t, and that’s humiliating,” Stamos told People. At the time, Romijn had several high-profile feature films lined up including X-Men, X2, and X-Men: The Last Stand. She was also working on The Punisher, Godsend, and Lies and Alibis, not to mention headlining her upcoming TV series, Pepper Dennis.
Stamos, on the other hand, was having a hard time breaking out of TV and had far fewer high-profile gigs lined up in comparison. While in hindsight it seems silly to judge a relationship by such superficial measures, the Full House actor agreed that the public wasn’t too far off in their assumptions.
“I don’t blame her for it,” he went on to say in the People interview. “It was just the perception that people took, and maybe they weren’t wrong. She was doing great at that time and I wasn’t.”
“That’s when I really started to kind of drink a lot,” he said. In 2015, he was arrested for driving under the influence. To this day, he remains sober. “But without that, I never would’ve known what a real love is, and I would’ve never straightened up to get someone like Caitlin in my life.”
Stamos married fellow actress Caitlin McHugh in 2018 and the pair currently share a son named Billy. “If I didn’t go through all the things, all the heartache, I wouldn’t be who I am today. That’s what I hope people take away from it,” he added, referring to his memoir. The book hits shelves on Oct. 24.