NEED TO KNOW
Daisy Fuentes found love at the perfect time with husband Richard Marx.
Speaking with PEOPLE in a look back at her personal brand, Daisy Fuentes, the TV personality, 58, talked about finding love when she least expected it.
“He met the sassy 40-something-year-old who thought she didn’t need a man. That’s who he met, unfortunately,” Fuentes admits.
“By the time I met him, I think I was like 45, and I was really busy building a life that I loved. I had been through a few relationships that really left a little bit of a scar. And from every relationship I learned from every relationship, my walls came up a little higher,” she explains.
“I was just fully building my life the way I wanted it. I thought, ‘I’m open to relationships. Whoever wants to come into my life, come into my life. If you don’t, don’t, but just don’t block the doorway.’ “
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Fuentes considered herself an “independent powerhouse” and was prepared to “go with the flow” where her love life was concerned.
“I just thought that the man I envisioned as the perfect man didn’t exist, so I was just going to go with flow and if the relationship went sour, at least I have this great life — all my friends, I have my family, it’s fine. There’ll be somebody else. That’s where I was,” she recalls.
“Then Richard Marx comes along and busts the hole into that whole theory,” Fuentes laughs. “He is the man that he says he is.”
Having had her own experiences, Fuentes was “a little suspicious” going into the relationship.
“He also just ended a very long marriage. And so I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a rebound girl. This guy is too good to be true. He’s hurting. He’s going through a lot.’ And after a short period of time, I just thought, ‘He’s a good guy.’ He is the real deal, so he persisted. I think that being a strong independent woman, really, what that does is it separates the men from the boys. He understood, and he pursued me, and I was important enough for him to pursue, and that was not lost on me.”
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“By this point, I had learned that I am not chasing a man down. I am not going to make myself smaller to satisfy someone else’s insecurities. I was going to be exactly who I am, and this way, there are no surprises later. This is who I am. This is who I am, being jaded. This is who I am with my leftover scars. This is who I am, with my walls up. And he was like, ‘Okay, yeah, let’s work on that. I’ll bring the walls down and I’ll soften you up and just let me love you.’ ”
While the couple coming up on celebrating 10 years of marriage and 12 years together, “part of our marriage feel brand new.
“Part of our life feel like I’ve never known anything before him. And I think that that’s probably the way it’s supposed to be.”
