Chynna Phillips didn’t expect a cross-country move to trigger issues in her marriage to Billy Baldwin.
Phillips, 56, discussed what led to the rough patch — and how the couple worked through it — in a video uploaded to her YouTube channel on Monday, April 22.
“[It’s] frustrating because just when I feel like we’re on a roll and things are starting to get better, we start the bickering again,” the singer said . “I was really proud of myself because we started arguing this morning and he was like, ‘What do you want?’ And I was like, ‘I want to communicate properly. I want us to have effective communication.’”
Phillips confessed that she and Baldwin, 61, were “getting on each other’s last nerve” on their journey back to the West Coast. They were eventually able to have a “normal conversation” after Baldwin “gained his composure.”
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“It was definitely a victory for us because we have a tendency to just sort of spiral and the communication breakdown gets worse and worse and we’re off to the races,” she continued. “Billy’s my life partner. He’s the one I want to have the healthiest relationship with. But sometimes I don’t. A lot of times I don’t because I don’t want to rock the boat, or I don’t want to put him in a bad mood, or I’m walking on eggshells.”
Phillips, who shares kids Jameson, 24, Vance, 22, and Brooke, 19, with Baldwin, took “responsibility” for the ups and downs in her marriage. She noted on Monday that she needed to “learn to trust” her husband while still speaking up when there are problems.
“It just comes down to me not wanting to trigger him, but the truth is that me having that fear is keeping us from true intimacy, because it’s preventing me from opening up to him and I’m trying to guard his feelings and yet I’m causing more trouble in our marriage by doing that,” Phillips said. “I’m shooting myself in the foot.”
Phillips and Baldwin, who tied the knot in 1995, haven’t shied away from discussing their relationship struggles.
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“I’ve been with Billy for 32 years, and we have an awesome marriage, but we definitely had the hardest couple years of our lives,” Phillips admitted in a YouTube livestream in January. “I think it’s because I just took the deep dive into Jesus, and I think he didn’t quite know what to do with that.”
Phillips said the rift was due to a “power struggle” between her and Baldwin, adding, “I’m growing, I’m changing … I’m not the same person I was 30 years ago, and I refused to have the same marriage that we had 30 years ago. It’s time for us to mature and grow. He was on board, but I think that for him it was also like, ‘Well, you’re not into the things that I’m into.’”
Despite the “real struggle” in their marriage, Phillips remained confident in their ability to work things out. “We really hope to find something that we can do in philanthropy that is going to help other people and that we can do that together as a team,” she said at the time. “So, that’s a beautiful goal that we have.”
