Amy Grant and Vince Gill on Finding Love After First Marriages (Exclusive)

It’s been decades since Vince Gill and Amy Grant endured what she calls “the long years” – the time between first meeting in 1993 and when they became a couple in 1999 – but Grant says it still “makes me sweat of thinking about them.”

The reason is obvious: from the start, the chemistry between the two artists was undeniable – not only to each other, but also to everyone around them – and yet both were in their first marriages at the time.

“It wasn’t something we orchestrated,” Grant, 64, tells PEOPLE in a joint interview with the couple, who recently released their holiday album When I think of Christmas ahead of their annual Christmas residency at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. “It was like a life orchestrated that we kept crossing paths.”

Fortunately, the stresses of that era are ancient history for Grant and Gill, now happily married for nearly a quarter of a century. Yet they continue to glean wisdom and perspective from their journey that could inspire anyone seeking a second chance.

“Life is full of all kinds of mysteries,” says Grant. “And I’m not saying that any of us did it completely wrong or okay, but what we’ve experienced is just so much grace and forgiveness for each other and for our first families and our second families, and it’s possible to reconcile. It is possible to mend fences. It may not be in the context of original relationships, but it is possible to find a way in life with respect.”

The two first met when Gill, already a major country star, invited Grant, himself a trailblazer in Christian pop music, to appear as a guest on his Christmas TV special.

“I just remember the smile,” says Gill, 67. “That’s all I can remember. It was a giddy smile that just stopped me in my tracks. And it had never happened to me like that before.”

Grant remembers being nervous before rehearsal, and her first memory of Gill was his act of kindness: “I walked right into the rehearsal room and Vince came over and put his arm around me and said, ‘Hey, unknitted eyebrows, it’s coming to be okay.’ I remember saying, ‘Wow, thanks for saying that.'”

Musically, they clicked, and after the show’s taping, working together professionally seemed natural. Gill returned Grant’s favor and made a guest appearance at her Nashville holiday show that year.

Soon after, Gill famously felt a touch of inspiration from what had first captured him about Grant: “I was writing songs with a friend of mine and he said, ‘What do you want to write about today?’ I said: ‘Let’s write a song about Amy Grant’s smile.’ He said, ‘Do you even know her?’ I said, ‘Not very well, but she sure has a good smile.’

The romantic ballad he and Pete Wasner wrote, “Whenever You Come Around,” eventually became one of Gill’s biggest hits, as well as a signature song. Before it was released, Gill shared it with Grant during their own songwriting session, and she recalls, “All I could think of was ‘Goll, lucky girl’.” It would be years before she found out that she was Gill’s muse.

Grant also invited Gill to duet with her on “House of Love,” the title track of her 1994 album. Although Grant had no hand in writing the lyrics, they now seem eerily prescient: “Sometimes life is funny / You think ​​you are in your darkest hour / When the lights go on in the house of love.”

In fact, both of their marriages at the time were rocky. Grant married Christian artist Gary Chapman in 1982 and they had three young children, a son and two daughters. Gill married country artist Janis Oliver in 1980 and they had a daughter. Grant and Gill’s chemistry did not go unnoticed by their respective spouses.

“I think the energy was palpable for all of us,” Grant says, “and we tried to be so respectful. You can’t know. You can’t see anything. And years later, I’ve said to Janis: ‘You could have been in all sorts of ways and you were so kind to me.’ It was a tough stretch.”

Gill says: “What was painful was that most people assumed the worst of us and it wasn’t fair and it was wrong. You couldn’t go back and undo what people said and what people thought.. .Unfortunately, it’s human nature to assume the worst. It couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Gill and Oliver eventually divorced in 1997. Grant remembers Chapman learning about it in the paper: “Gary put it down—that’s the first any of us heard about it—and he said, ‘Oh dear God , someone finally reached the wall because it was hard for everyone.”

Grant and Chapman undertook marriage counseling, but they announced their separation in December 1998, and their divorce was finalized the following June. Four months later, Grant confirmed in an interview that she and Gill were dating.

Finally, says Gill, they had arrived at a moment when “the most beautiful truth” of their connection “was allowed to find itself.”

The couple married in March 2000, surrounded by friends and family — “the people,” Gill says, “that really, to me, encapsulated my whole life. Just face after face after face after face, all the people rooting for you, kept of you.”

The challenging work of mixing families quickly began. But a year later, the birth of their daughter, Corrina, came with a bonus that helped the couple overcome many of the obstacles of stepparenting.

“It connected us all in a way, in a bloody way, which was beautiful,” says Gill.

Both Grant and Gill say they have benefited from the stage of life they were in when they got married. “One thing about getting married at 40,” says Grant, “is you never guess. I say, ‘You’ve lived a lifetime, just like I have.'” You go into everything (saying), “Hey, this is how I did it. How did you do it?” It would be great if people did it at 21, but it’s an easier lesson in the forties.”

Gill adds, “We just gave each other the grace to be what we’ve always been, and then we just let it unfold from there… Sometimes we don’t see eye to eye on how things are supposed to go, ( but) I’d rather be kind than be right, and I think she would be too, because that’s what she’s about. It’s an ordinary kindness that I’ve never seen.”

The two have also found other ways to navigate their differences. Grant, for example, is an adventurer who loves to travel. Gill is a homebody who goes to the music studio or the golf course. They make it work, Grant says, because “one thing we’ve given each other in our marriage is freedom,” all while knowing that “you’re the person I want to come back to.”

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Just three months shy of their 25th wedding anniversary, the couple are now enjoying what Grant calls the “golden years” — a time that “feels magical.” Their lives are filled with friends and family, children and grandchildren, and the satisfaction of career achievements that keep on coming. But, Grant says, they derive an abundance of their joy simply from their togetherness, often in simple, quiet evenings at their home in Nashville.

Grant says Gill loves to tease her: “He keeps saying, ‘Will you marry me now?'”

Grant doesn’t even consider the question. “Yes,” she says, and the answer comes almost as a sigh. But what really says it all is the smile.

For more from Amy Grant and Vince Gill, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere this Friday.