Gotta love, true love and that’s the season for Nelly and Ashanti. The St. Louis icon is opening up about his journey with Ashanti and how time apart helped them come back together stronger than ever. In a recent interview with People, the St. Louis rapper reflected on their love story, likening their early relationship to a test run that gave both of them perspective on what really matters.
“Everybody don’t get a chance to, if you could say, take a test drive,” Nelly explained. “It’s like when people say, ‘You should always test drive a car before you buy it.’ I hate to minimize that because this is real life, so you don’t want it to feel like that.”
Nelly got candid about the ups and downs they faced and how maturity played a major role in their second chance at love. “It’s about the good outweighing the bad,” he said. “What you thought mattered a lot, once you go through other scenarios, you realize that’s not really as big of a deal as you thought it would be.”
He continued, “Or you get something that you thought you was missing, and it still doesn’t compensate or fill a void, and you’re like, ‘Damn, I thought that would mean more,’ but that doesn’t. It’s just growth.”
Nelly and Ashanti originally began dating in 2003 and ended things a decade later. After years of separation and personal growth, they reunited in September 2023 and secretly tied the knot three months later. In July of the following year, the couple welcomed their first child together, a son named Kareem Kenkaide Haynes.
Now older, wiser, and officially a family, Nelly says the lessons from their past helped shape their present. What started as a trial run has now turned into a lifelong journey together.