Ahead of the release of his new album = on Oct. 29, Ed Sheeran is looking back on his proposal to his wife of two years, Cherry Seaborn. The “Shivers” singer sat down with Norwegian-Swedish talk show Skavlan and spoke on how humanizing it was to ask for Seaborn’s hand in marriage in 2017.
“I remember getting down on one knee and I said, ‘Will you marry me?’ And she was like, ‘Are you f—ing joking?’,” the singer recalled. “There was this long silence and I just went, ‘Please?’”
“It was the most human I have ever felt because in my career, sometimes you find it is like, ‘Can I do this?’ and people are like, ‘Yeah.’ You kind of get to a point where it becomes normal and then you are in a situation where you are literally on your knees being like, ‘Will you marry me?’” Sheeran continued. “It is such a huge life decision someone has to make in the blink of an eye. Thankfully, she did say yes.”
The actual events of the proposal proved to be stressful for the singer — Sheeran also admitted that the perfect evening he had planned was ruined by rain.
“On the day it was pissing down with rain and I’d built a f—ing pergola at the end of the garden to do it. Sunset, pergola, some wine … And it was pissing down with rain,” he said. “I kept saying we should go for a walk and she was like, ‘No!’ I was like, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go for a walk?’… Time was ticking. There was a date engraved on the ring and I was like, ‘I’ve got to do it today!’ It gets to 9pm and I was like, ‘For f–k sake!’”
The couple married in January 2019 after four years of dating — Sheeran wrote his 2017 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit, “Perfect,” about Seaborn — and welcomed their daughter, Lyra Antarctica Seaborn Sheeran, in August 2020. The Grammy award-winner opened up about the possibility of having more children on the Open House Party podcast, saying, “I feel like we were so lucky to be able to have one that I think I would obviously love more. But I think we’re so lucky to just have one. So if nothing else happens, I’m so happy, basically.”
Sheeran’s fourth solo studio album, =, comes out Oct. 29. It was preceded by “Bad Habits” and “Shivers,” which have thus far peaked at No. 2 and No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, respectively, with “Bad Habits” having remained in the top 10 since its release.
