‘I Wouldn’t Have Been Able To Fit Into The Role Of A Traditional Wife’ – Oprah Winfrey On Never Getting Married

Oprah Winfrey is baring it all in Vogue’s September issue.

The mogul opens up on marriage, growing older, depression and having to end The Oprah Winfrey show in the very honest interview.

See excerpts below!

On being depressed

“I actually started to think, maybe I really am depressed. Because it’s more than ‘I feel bad about this.’ I felt like I was behind a veil. I felt like what many people had described over the years on my show, and I could never imagine it. What’s depression? Why don’t you just pick yourself up?” she says it didn’t last for more than 6weeks, after she bought blocks of tickets to try to get Beloved’s box office up, she decided it was time to fix up. That’s when the gratitude practice became really strong for me, because it’s hard to remain sad if you’re focused on what you have instead of what you don’t have.”

On becoming older

“In your 40s, you’re coming into it, you’re intellectualising things, and you kind of know it and you feel it,” she says. “But there is a deepening and a broadening and quickening of the knowing that happens in your 50s. Maya Angelou used to say to me, ‘The 50s are everything you’ve been meaning to be.’ You’d been meaning to be that person. By the time you hit 60, there are just no damn apologies. And certainly not at 63. And the weight thing that was always such a physical, spiritual, emotional burden for me—no apologies for that either.”

On Her Relationship with Stedman Graham

“Nobody believes it, but it’s true. The only time I brought it up was when I said to Stedman, ‘What would have happened if we had actually gotten married?’ And the answer is: ‘We wouldn’t be together.’ We would not have stayed together, because marriage requires a different way of being in this world. His interpretation of what it means to be a husband and what it would mean for me to be a wife would have been pretty traditional, and I would not have been able to fit into that.”

On Having To End The Oprah Winfrey Show

“I started thinking about the times: where we were, would I be able to take it digital. People were moving into ‘I want to be able to watch it when I want to watch it,’ and the four o’clock hour was no longer must-see television. I could feel that happening with the audience. Their behaviors were shifting, and the media world was changing. I had written something in my journals years before: ‘I never want to stay too long in the ring so I end up punch-drunk.’ I didn’t want people saying, ‘She shoulda quit that show three years ago!’ ”