Rocker Rod Stewart was almost dumped by his wife Penny Lancaster at the start of their romance because she refused to date a man who was still playing the field.
The photographer was just 28 when she first met Rod, who is 26 years her senior, and although they had great chemistry, she didn’t want to become just another of the singer’s flings.
“He was still playing games when I met him,” Penny recalled on U.K. talk show Loose Women. “I didn’t want to be a girlfriend, I wanted to be ‘the’ girlfriend.”
The leggy beauty made her feelings clear from the start, but Rod didn’t believe her until his bad behavior almost cost him the relationship with his future wife altogether.
“I said from the beginning – ‘Please don’t do that to me. I understand if you want to go about with other girls, but I don’t want to play games,'” Penny shared. “I remember finding a photo of him with another woman and I said, ‘I warned you, goodbye!’ and I walked.”
“He panicked and said, ‘I didn’t know whether to take you seriously,'” the 46-year-old continued. “The fact that I spoke up for myself meant he respected me and we ended up being a perfect match.”
Penny and the Maggie May hitmaker, who began dating in 1999, will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary next month.
Rod, 72, previously opened up about his first impressions of his third wife in his 2012 memoir.
“She was tall and blonde, with a drop-dead figure,” he wrote. “But what I was also attracted to was the obvious warmth she had about her, and the kindness in her face.”
The couple shares two sons, Alastair, 11, and six-year-old Aiden, while Rod also has six other children from previous relationships.