Live in Love by Lauren Akins & Mark Dagostino

Author:Lauren Akins & Mark Dagostino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Backstage before Thomas Rhett played at the Grand Ole Opry

“Wait till you see where we go from here,” he said.

But it didn’t matter to me if he became a star, or if that amphitheater was the biggest venue he ever played. As long as we had each other, I knew we’d be good.

What mattered most to me was getting to October 12—our wedding day. And while that was only three months away, it turned out we had some unusual hurdles to clear before our big day came.

First, Thomas Rhett released his first EP that August, and he was nervous about it. Which meant he needed me to be there for him as much as I possibly could. So I showed up. I held his hand and reassured him before he walked into press interviews. Whenever his stomach started doing backflips before he took the stage for an important performance, I reminded him just how much he was meant to do this. I saw how competitive he felt as he watched the charts, and I saw what his singles were doing compared to some of his new-artist peers; I reminded him that his success didn’t have to happen all at once. I tried to be a calming voice on his shoulder, reminding him that it was all in God’s hands anyway, and that I would be there for him no matter what.

“I’m so glad I asked you to marry me,” he’d say.

Which gets us to the second big hurdle we faced: There were forces in the music industry who didn’t want him to get married at all. When I started showing up in pictures on Thomas Rhett’s social media accounts, before anyone in the public knew we were engaged to be married, some of his female fans made comments, like, “Who is this chick?” and “Hands off my man!” and “Look at this gold-digger of a girl!”

That last one really got me, because Thomas Rhett wasn’t making much money, and anyone who knew me knew that was never my motivation. People have no idea what a grind it is for musicians in the early days. I mean, yeah, he had an advance from the record label that helped him make ends meet while he got his band together and went on the road. But after paying for all the expenses of road life, Thomas Rhett was only pulling in about $1,500 a month. That was all he had to live on, and that wouldn’t change for a while. The two of us were planning to live in a condo that his dad owned in Nashville, just because it was the only place we knew we would be able to afford once we got married, and we knew how lucky we were to have that. We wouldn’t have been able to afford rent and utilities, let alone have much of a life, anywhere in the Nashville metro area on that kind of income.

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