The athlete fathered his 9-year-old son, Xavier, in 2013, when he and Union were on a break.
Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union have come a long way since they first met in 2007 while co-hosting a sponsored Super Bowl party and started dating in 2009, but it hasn't been easy.
During an appearance on the Club Shay Shay podcast on Wednesday, the 41-year-old former basketball pro opened up about telling his now-wife about the child he fathered in 2013 while the couple were on a break. Wade fathered his son, Xavier, now nine years old, with Basketball Wives star Aja Metoyer after he and Union decided to take a break from their relationship when they couldn't make their schedules work. He and the Bring It On star rekindled their romance in the summer of 2013, which is when he told Union about the pregnancy.
"You're thinking about it all. It's all scary," the retired NBA star shared. "One, the whole situation is scary enough, you're a public figure. But you know that this is going to hurt someone that you've been building a relationship with and a life with."
Wade admitted that he tried to break up with Union rather than admit the truth, but said the 50-year-old actress wouldn't allow him to push her away.
"I tried to pussyfoot around it, I tried to break up with her. 'Hey, things have been bad lately,' 'Hey, we've been having a little distance in our relationship anyway,' I tried all of that," he confessed. "She kept showing up. I couldn't have gotten through that moment without her sticking with me. We were in the playoffs. That was a rough time for me. You got a lot on your mind. You're keeping something from people you love. It's heavy."
Recalling the life-changing moment and the aftermath in her memoir, You Got Anything Stronger, Union shared: "It should go without saying that we were not in a good place in our relationship at the time that child was conceived. But we were in a much better place when he finally told me about the pregnancy. To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience. There are people - strangers who I will never meet - who have been upset that I have not previously talked about that trauma. I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy I am not sure I have them now. But truth matters."
She continued, "Each day, he had worked to be forgiven, and I had chosen to do so. And part of this journey of making peace with our love is also making peace with ourselves."
Wade -- who also shares Zaire, 21, and Zaya, 16, with ex-wife Siovaughn Funches -- shared that he told Union about Metoyer's pregnancy before it made headlines, which gave them a chance to work through the pain and present a united front. "Ultimately, you gotta sit with you and you gotta sit with this person if this is who you're going to be with. I had to sit with my wife and have this conversation," he recalled.
Wade previously opened up about telling Union that he had fathered a child with someone else in his ESPN documentary, D. Wade: Life Unexpected.
"Hardest thing I've ever had to do is man up and tell Gabrielle Union that I've had a child with somebody else," he said in the documentary. "I couldn't sleep. I wasn't eating. When you hold something in that you know is going to come out and you have this information and you know it's gonna f**k somebody's life up, that you care about, that you love, if it don't hurt you, then you're not human. ... Me and Gab just went through something that you never want to go through and we still came out of it."
Eight months after their reunion, Wade asked the Being Mary Jane star to marry him. They said their 'I dos' in front of friends and family in Miami at the Chateau Artisan Castle on Aug. 30, 2014. John Legend serenaded the couple with his hit single, "All of Me," which became the unofficial anthem of wedding season 2014 after Legend penned it for his wife, Chrissy Teigen.
In October 2017, Union opened up about her three-year struggle with fertility in her memoir, We're Going to Need More Wine, detailing the couple's heartbreaking struggle to have children of their own and the lengths she'd gone to in trying to conceive.
"I have had eight or nine miscarriages,” she wrote. “For three years, my body has been a prisoner of trying to get pregnant -- I’ve either been about to go into an IVF cycle, in the middle of an IVF cycle, or coming out of an IVF cycle."
The couple's prayers were answered when their daughter, Kaavia James Union Wade, was born on Nov. 7, 2018, via surrogate.
On Wednesday, Wade noted that although his and Union's relationship "hasn't been perfect," with therapy and open communication, they remain happily married. "It's been something that is going to continue to be something I have to work at and work on. It doesn't go away," the athlete added. "When it comes to my wife and I, yeah, that's hard. It's always there."
The athlete admitted that he's worried about how the headline-making story of his conception has affected Xavier. "That's hard on him. This is going to always be there. He's done nothing," he said. "This is a young kid, who already has a negative impact next to his name. I think about that."
But ultimately, the father of four said he has no doubt that his family is "gonna get through it. Time, distance, space, it doesn't help it but it makes it -- it allows me to see things differently."
"[I] love my kids. This my story. I didn't ask for it to all be this way. I don't know what's coming in the future," he added. "Right now, this is all mine. So as good as it looks, or as bad as it seems, it's mine. And I'm thankful."
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