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Gabrielle Union Talks About Her Biggest Failure: Her Marriage

Gabrielle Union sits down with Broadly to discuss how her failed first marriage taught her to fight for her own happiness.

High-Powered Fails is an animated series where powerful luminaries share the times in their lives when they didn't quite hit the mark.

In the first episode of High-Powered Fails, we sit down with actress Gabrielle Union, who tells us how she learned to chase her happiness through her divorce from her first husband, former NFL player Chris Howard. "When I did fail, I failed very big and I failed very publicly, and I failed at marriage," she tells Broadly.

In a very personal story, Union opens up about two arguments in her relationship with Howard which ultimately ended in divorce. One, ironically, took place on the day the two became engaged, and in retrospect, she says, should have been a red flag. Union was using her then-fiancé's computer when she found some incriminating messages between him and his friend about another woman. Upset, she confronted him and he fessed up to keeping contact with this woman in case Union said no to his proposal that same day. She decided to ignore the red flag and proceed with the marriage.

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Because of both Union and her husband's celebrity status, they had only about 24 hours before the media publicized their separation, which Union remembers as "incredibly painful and difficult." Still, through the pain—and with the help of a life coach who asked her, "If you don't know what makes you happy, how the hell could someone else know what makes you happy?"—Union explains that she's learned to seek out the jobs, friendships, and relationships that truly contribute to her happiness and bring her peace.