Image Credit: Rick Rowell/ABCAt what point does an affair stop becoming tabloid fodder and start becoming a love story? Is it after a year and a half? That’s what LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian are hoping. The couple sat down for their first joint interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts for Wednesday’s In the Spotlight Nashville special. Rimes started off the conversation solo, and those tears we saw in the promo came when Roberts read back to her a passage from Rimes’ memoir in which she describes being a teen star who’d wake up not wanting to perform for anybody, just wanting “to be,” and was forced to do two shows a day. When she wasn’t onstage though, she had no idea what to do with herself or who she was without it. “That’s been my life,” Rimes said, trying to hold back tears and admitting she was extra emotional because she hadn’t been able to sleep the night before the interview. “I’m learning who I am without it.”

Who that is, is someone who has made up with the father she once sued for allegedly misappropriating her earnings, and who saw acting as another form of expression — not a way to end two marriages. She said she turned down the role in the Lifetime TV movie Nora Roberts’ Northern Lights three times because she was terrified to do it. Then, of course, ABC showed the scene in which her character asks Cibrian’s “Do you want to have sex?” Classy! Rimes said the tabloid story that hurt her the most was the one in which Cibrian’s wife at the time referred to her as a “stalker.” Roberts didn’t ask Rimes (or Cibrian) if there was a time when they tried to break off their affair. Instead, she asked Rimes how she would respond to people who considered her a homewrecker who didn’t think about those she would be hurting (her husband, and Cibrian’s wife and two children). “Well, I can’t change their minds. Nothing I’m going to say is gonna change it. I do know that, and I have accepted that,” she said. “It happens every day to so many people. And if I take away my album sales, my awards, and you have just another couple — you have two couples whose marriages didn’t work, who really stumbled upon each other and fell in love. And never ever was I thinking of hurting someone.”  READ FULL STORY »