Here's How Tim McGraw and Faith Hill's Legendary Romance Began

Together the singers Faith Hill and Tim McGraw got dubbed the queen and king of Country. While it is a nod to their singing ability, it also applies to their love story that reads more like a fairy tale.

Tim and Faith first got to know each other when she performed as the opening act on their Spontaneous Combustion tour in 1996.

Both in relationships at the time, with Tim, engaged to Kristine Donahue and Faith engaged to the record producer Scott Hendricks, neither of them knew how their lives were about to change.

Faith had previously been married to Daniel Hill, whose surname she kept, but their marriage became strained after she met her biological mother for the first time.

"Meeting her birth mother had a profound impact on Faith, which led to a profound failure of our marriage," Daniel told Good Housekeeping in March 2007.

The couple divorced in 1991 after five years of marriage and Faith turned her focus to her career. She landed a record deal with Warner Bros. Music in 1992 and released her first album, “Take Me As I Am” a year later.

Soon after she began dating Scott Hendricks. He produced her first two albums and later on, they became engaged.

But everything changed when Tim couldn’t deny his feelings for Faith while on tour anymore, so he decided to invite her to his dressing room one night after a show.

“I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell. I thought she was way out of my league,” Tim recalled.

Little did he know that the feeling was mutual and the couple gushed about the chemistry between them years later in an interview with Larry King and said, “It’s always been magic from the first, the first time that we performed together on stage, which was spontaneous combustion…We fell in love on that tour and sang together night after night, and it was just beautiful.”

Their relationship “started snowballing from there,” and they broke off with their relationships with their respective partners.

“It obviously wasn’t a rock-solid situation, or it wouldn’t have ended. Tim is not the reason I left,” Faith said. “If someone is going to judge my character because I was engaged to somebody and then I left him for somebody else, I can’t control that. But I wasn’t about to let Tim slip through my hands.”

A few months after they started dating, Tim popped the question in their dressing room at the Grand Junction in Colorado, while still on tour.

“I looked at her, grabbed her by the hand, and I said, ‘I’m really serious. I want you to marry me,” Tim said of his proposal to Faith, but she thought he was joking and replied, “We’re at a country music festival in a trailer house, and you’re asking me to marry you?”

Tim assured her that he was serious about the proposal and then went onstage to perform. After his performance, Tim returned to the dressing room and found the answer to his question.

“I had in my dressing room…this foldout case that had a mirror in it that was my dressing armoire. I still have it to this day. When I came back offstage, [I saw] a Sharpie with lipstick kisses all over it, saying, ‘Yes! I am gonna be your wife.’ It had, ‘I love you’ with big lipstick kisses,” Tim gushed.

A few short months later, on October 6, 1996, the couple got married at Tim’s aunt Barbara’s home close to Start, Louisiana soon after Faith fell pregnant with their first of three daughters.

The couple welcomed Gracie Katherine into the world in May 1997. Faith gave birth to Maggie Elizabeth in August 1998, followed by Audrey Caroline in December 2001.

The secret to their long-lasting relationship is making sure they take time for themselves, as Faith told PEOPLE, "We both have our daily routines, and we have our own dressing rooms. We each have our own space to retreat to so we do get time to ourselves.”

In 2018, the couple sat down with publication and elaborated on their relationship’s journey through the years.

Faith and Tim spoke more about their secrets to a happy marriage, how they have managed to work closely together for two decades, and what they do to keep their love alive.