RHOC’s Gretchen Rossi Explains Why She and Slade Smiley Never Got Married Despite 16 Years Together, Calls Out Tamra’s Behavior and Talks Origin of Feud

Gretchen Rossi revealed why she never married her partner, Slade Smiley, and addressed how her feud with Tamra Judge began. The 46-year-old also shared that she initially turned down the offer to return to Real Housewives of Orange County.

Gretchen entered the show in season three, and she began dating Slade a few seasons later. At the time, fans believed the relationship was doomed to fail, but they stayed together and now have a child. Though Slade proposed to Gretchen in the season eight finale, they never tied the knot.

In an interview for The Orange County Register, Gretchen hinted at her feud with Tamra.

“When I decided to do the show, I really wasn’t coming back to start this feud with Tamra again,” she said. “I was hopeful that maybe we could actually have an adult conversation … There could be some accountability that was taken on her part, which I was foolish to think because I’ve been watching her, you know, for the last 11 years, being the same person … but I certainly wasn’t afraid to call her out and address her on the B.S. and the stuff that she had done for years.”

“People from her camp who used to be friends with her were like, ‘Oh, she was so mad because you came in and she was always considered the hot one and the young one, and you stole her thunder,'” said Gretchen. “I don’t know if any of that’s true. But then it just kind of became this epic feud between us, and changed a little bit of the trajectory of ‘Housewives’ as a whole.”

As for her return to the show, Gretchen stated, “Throughout the years that I’ve been gone, there’ve been talks here and there where someone from production will call and put their feelers out: Would you ever want to come back? There was definitely a time I was like, ‘Absolutely not, no, no, no.'”

“Then, when they called this season, I was like, ‘Nice of you to call, but no thank you.’ They were like, ‘Well, let’s not just say no off the bat. Let’s talk through these emotions.’ [She laughs] Finally, as me and Slade sat down to think about it, I had a lot of friendships from the past cast, and I had a lot of friendships with newer cast members,” she said. “I looked at Slade, and I was like, ‘If there ever was a time for me to come back, this would probably be the season.'”

She then addressed why she and Slade never tied the knot.

“So there really isn’t any like, ‘Oh, we’re not getting married.’ I don’t think that’s ever been our intent,” she said. “It’s been more about circumstantial situations. When we first put a date on a calendar, we didn’t realize the date we had picked was a holiday weekend, and a lot of our families were not available, had already booked a trip or whatever. And then Slade ended up getting booked for a miniseries with the History Channel down in Mexico for multiple months that interfered with the date as well.”

“And I started looking at my biological clock, going, you know, I’m 26, 27, and I really want to have a child. By the time we figure out this wedding crap, I’m probably not even going to be able to have a child anymore,” she continued. “So we decided to put our efforts and our money into IVF and try to have a child, because he had had a vasectomy 15 years earlier, and we knew we probably had to do IVF.”

“Then, after I had Skylar, I was in massive postpartum depression for almost three years,” she said. “I felt overweight and I didn’t feel good. My mind, you have a newborn, you’re not sleeping, you’re angry, all the stuff. So it wasn’t about, ‘I don’t want to get married,’ it was just circumstantial stuff … It really wasn’t until this year when it’s all brought back up again. Everyone’s asking us so maybe this is the time to do it. Skylar is of an age where she can truly understand it.”