Oprah Winfrey is one of the most famous people in the entire world. She’s so famous, in fact, that you don’t even need to refer to her by her last name: just say “Oprah,” and everyone knows exactly who you are talking about. This popularity, however, hasn’t kept even her biggest fans from asking questions about her.
The biggest question is quite straightforward: why did Oprah never get married and have children? After all, many other media moguls ended up settling down somewhere along the way, but this talk show queen never did. As it turned out, she had some pretty major reasons for staying single and child-free.
What are those reasons, though? What does Oprah have to say about the matter, and how does her long-term boyfriend feel about the matter? Keep reading to find out!
Why Oprah was pressured to get married
It’s an open secret that many in Oprah’s orbit pressured her into settling down and starting a traditional family. It’s also something she has openly spoken about: in a 2017 interview with Good Housekeeping, she admitted that unnamed “people were pressuring me to get married and have children.” She also made a surprise admission to the outlet: that whenever they were pressuring her to have kids, “I knew I was not going to be a person that ever regretted not having them.”
Why did she have no regrets about this sensitive topic? Oprah has given many reasons over the years, and we’re going to touch on the biggest ones. But in 2017, she told Good Housekeeping that her job and her celebrity status made her feel like a mother to children all around the world. Therefore, she never had any real desire to have her own children because she felt like a mother to millions of children all over the globe.
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Too busy to be a mom
As we said before, Oprah Winfrey has given more than a few reasons over the years for why she didn’t want to have children. In a 2013 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she admitted that she always felt too busy to have any kids. Regarding how busy her schedule was, she summed things up very bleakly: “If I had kids, my kids would hate me.”
While that’s a depressing statement, the talk show host followed it up with a bit of dark humor. Speculating about what would have happened if she actually had kids, she said, “They would have ended up on the equivalent of the ‘Oprah’ show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
In this way, it’s fair to say that Oprah is a problem-solver. Once she imagined how bad things would be if she had become a mother, she did everything in her power to keep that from happening!
Her crazy guests made things worse
Earlier, we discussed Oprah’s macabre joke that if she had kids, they would have grown up hating her busy schedule and airing all her dirty laundry out on a rival talk show. It’s morbidly funny to think about, but this isn’t the only time that Oprah has brought up her hypothetical kids in the context of talk show guests. In fact, she once went as far as saying that it was her crazy guests that made her want to avoid having children in the first place!
In a 2019 interview with People, Oprah said the quiet part out loud regarding the guests that she had on her show. “I realized, ‘Whoa, I’m talking to a lot of messed-up people,” she said, echoing the thoughts of countless viewers. But she eventually had something of a revelation about those guests: “They are messed up because they had mothers and fathers who were not aware of how serious that job is.”
You can see where this is going: Oprah worried that she would have focused too much on her career, not realizing how serious the job of motherhood would be. To avoid causing her future kids any trauma, Oprah simply avoided having kids altogether.
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Why didn’t Oprah marry her long-term boyfriend?
We’ve very thoroughly covered why Oprah Winfrey never wanted to have children. But that leaves another question: why did she never get married? None of Oprah’s fans would want their mogul to marry just anyone, of course. But Oprah has been dating Stedman Graham for nearly 40 years. At this point, it’s only reasonable to ask why they never tied the knot!
Oprah gave the answer to Vogue back in 2017, but it’s admittedly somewhat cryptic. She claimed that if she and Stedman “had actually gotten married,” they “would not have stayed together, because marriage requires a different way of being in this world.” In other words, she and Stedman (who is perfectly fine never marrying Oprah) both think marriage would require too many changes to their lives and lifestyles.
Maybe Oprah just wants all the benefits of marriage and none of the drawbacks? If so, she’s an inspiration to never settle for anything less than you want. And, of course, to never settle for what others think you should be doing.