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Katharine McPhee has admitted the age difference between her and husband David Foster had given her pause for thought went it came to getting involved with the Grammy winner.
Her concerns, the 36-year-old actress says, about the public perception of her relationship with her 71-year-old husband.
"We all have the ability to label things and to look at something at face value and make a judgment. But things are never exactly as they appear. I'm in love with our love story and that's all that matters," Katharine said on a recent episode of Dr Berlin's Informed Pregnancy Podcast.
"The perception of what people try to create, especially with women, [is that] it's always the woman's fault," she said.
"It's the woman who wants to be with the older man because he has money and he's had success and she wants this, that," she continued. "I mean, our story's been the complete opposite."
The Smash star added that their love story didn't just happen overnight.
"We had a real journey, and I had a real process," she added. "It took me a while to kind of come around to really want to have a real, serious relationship because I was very concerned with what people would think."
The couple met when David was Katharine’s mentor on American Idol in 2006 and enjoyed a decade of friendship before things turned romantic.
Katharine was previously married to US actor Nick Cokas and David has been married four times before.
The couple went public with their romance in 2017 after they were spotted having dinner at the swanky Nobu restaurant in Malibu, California.
The engagement news came a year after he finalised his divorce from wife number four Yolanda Foster, the mother of his stepchildren, models Bella and Gigi Hadid and their brother Anwar.
They tied the knot a year later in London, where Katharine had just ended a run of Waitress on West End.
The couple welcomed their first child, a baby boy, earlier this month. David is father to five daughters: Sara (40), Erin (38), Jordan (34), Allison (50), and Amy (47).
Despite four of his daughters being older than his new wife, they’ve welcomed Katharine into the family.
In fact, according to daughter Erin, Katherine has improved their relationships with their septuagenarian father.
“Interestingly, the age difference has played a role in a positive way. Our dad comes from a generation where women are more passive. He’s also passive about his feelings,” Erin, a writer, says.
“Kat has really pushed him to open up.”Their only gripe with their stepmom is her banging body."Our biggest issue is how hot she is. Her body is insane. When she comes over for family Sundays, I'm like, 'Don’t get in a bikini.' My husband's always like, 'Kat, get in the pool!'"
David has also spoken out in defence of their age gap, saying they share “a musical connection”.
“We have haters on social media and there’s not a person around that’s not going to make some comment about the age difference. But there are so many things that can bring a marriage down: It can be financial, it can be children, it can be geography, it can be infidelity. And one of them is age difference, but that’s our only problem,” the 16-time Grammy Award winner told USA Today last year.
“Everything else is in line, so it’s not going to bring us down.”
Sources: people.com, usmagazine.com, mirror.co.uk, usatoday.com, eonline.com, vogue.com, dailymail.co.uk
