“She’s my Sandra Dee from Grease, the good girl with a kind heart who always makes me feel upbeat when I’m around her,” he writes. “She’s one of the few women I have spent day after day with and still always look forward to seeing her again. I know what makes her laugh, we get each other and we have the sort of true friendship that’s supposed to be the foundation of a great, lasting relationship.”
But then he met Rebecca Romijn.
Stamos attended an afterparty for a Victoria’s Secret fashion show in 1994. Stamos went to the show with Loughlin, who teased him about his inability to keep his eyes off of Romijn as she walked the runway.
“As each leggy beauty walks down the runway, she shoots me a knowing look and maintains a little smirk,” he writes. “She knows I’m not as ready to settle down as I feel. She’s humoring me.”
But if Loughlin was his Sandra Dee from Grease, then Romijn was “the Sandy-in-Black-Leather at the end of Grease.”
Stamos and Romijn would eventually tie the knot in 1998.
“After two years of dating, I propose to her on Christmas Eve, naked. It’s a spontaneous moment, so I don’t have a ring,” he remembers. Five hundred guests attended their wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
The couple stayed married for nearly six years before announcing their separation in 2004. In his book, Stamos reveals they separated privately almost a year before that, in March 2003.
“Something cruel and calculating creeps into the pleasant patter of the day,” he writes of his relationship’s downfall. “She smiles at me a little less, doesn’t look me in the eyes over dinner, takes phone calls in the other room. Whispers behind doors. She makes a trip to the store seem clandestine.”
“It’s a strange, f**ked-up ‘what the hell is happening’ type of heartbreak that up to this point, I’ve never felt. I wasn’t prepared for this one,” Stamos writes. “I never knew I could be so angry and hate-filled toward another human being, much less one I had been dedicated to for a decade.”
If You Would Have Told Me is out now.