When Ed Sheeran's wife was in her second pregnancy, he penned a heartbreaking diary entry.

When singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran first met his wife Cherry Seaborn, he was smitten. Although the pair were only in their teens and still in high school, Sheeran says he just had a feeling they'd be good for each other.

It would take over a decade for them to officially become an item — but once they did, they were inseparable. They've since welcomed two children together and built a private, deeply grounded life away from the spotlight.

Sheeran offered a sweet glimpse into their loving relationship on the Call Her Daddy podcast this week, revealing how his wife keeps him humble despite his megastar fame.

"Honestly, Cherry is the biggest grounding force," he said. "It's important to be able to go home and be like a regular human being."

Despite his global profile, Sheeran has kept their love story largely out of the public eye. But in early 2023, he gave fans a rare window into their private struggles, sharing a vulnerable diary entry on Instagram.

In the post, he revealed that Seaborn had been diagnosed with a tumour during her second pregnancy.

"I had been working on Subtract for a decade, trying to sculpt the perfect acoustic album, writing and recording hundreds of songs with a clear vision of what I thought it should be," he began the post.

"Then at the start of 2022, a series of events changed my life, my mental health, and ultimately the way I viewed music and art."

He explained that, in the span of a single month, Seaborn was told she had a tumour with no path to treatment until after the birth, his best friend, Jamal Edwards died suddenly, and he found himself in court defending his integrity as a songwriter.

Sheeran went on to say he wrote "whatever tumbled out" and in just over a week he "replaced a decade’s worth of work with my deepest darkest thoughts".

"I was spiralling through fear, depression and anxiety," he wrote. "I felt like I was drowning, head below the surface, looking up but not being able to break through for air."

The result of that period was Subtract, which Sheeran described as "opening the trapdoor into my soul".

"For the first time I’m not trying to craft an album people will like, I’m merely putting something out that’s honest and true to where I am in my adult life."

"This is last February’s diary entry and my way of making sense of it. This is Subtract."

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In his 2023 Disney+ documentary series Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All, Seaborn also opened up about the diagnosis, sharing how much it made her reflect on her mortality.

"It made me think, 'Oh if I died, what's people's perception of me? What do you leave behind?'," she said.

"For Ed, the whole point is he wants to say to people, 'I'm not just this music machine. I'm not just this robot that tries to get No. 1. I'm a father, I'm a son, I'm a friend'," she added. "It wasn't until this year when I was like, 'I might die.'"

Sheeran also spoke about how much his wife means to him, describing their relationship as "the most amazing thing in my life that nobody really knows about.

"Everything in my life got so much better when she got into it."

Thankfully, her diagnosis ended up being "much less severe" than first feared. Seaborn gave birth to their second daughter and was later able to have surgery. According to Entertainment Tonight, a follow-up MRI showed no signs of cancer returning.

Today, the couple live in Suffolk with their two daughters, Lyra and Jupiter, in a sprawling countryside home — far from the red carpets and flashing cameras.

Here's a look back at their love story, including the key role Taylor Swift played in getting them back together.

Ed Sheeran and Cherry Seaborn during The BRIT Awards 2022. Image: Getty.

From a schoolyard crush to the sweetest marriage.

Ed Sheeran grew up in Framlingham, Suffolk in the UK as a shy kid with a deep love of music. After primary school, he studied at Thomas Mills High School, where he met Cherry.

It was during his high school years that Sheeran developed a crush on Seaborn, but he never acted on it.

Once university came along, Seaborn decided to go to America to attend Duke University. With Seaborn out of the UK, it quashed any hope of the pair cementing a relationship.

The pair stayed in touch in their early adult years, but it wasn't until 2015 that they reunited. Of course, during this gap, Sheeran's fame had risen exponentially — he was a best-selling artist and had multiple hit songs to his name.

Sheeran got in contact with Seaborn, and when the pair were both in America, they met up.

Watch Ed Sheeran with James Corden on Carpool Karaoke. Post continues below.

Speaking to US Weekly, Sheeran said: "When we came to New York, where she was living at the time, we hung out and reconnected. She's great."

And Sheeran has Taylor Swift to thank. Swift was set to host a party on Rhode Island and Sheeran was invited. He asked Swift if he could have a plus one — with Seaborn in mind — and Swift said yes.

"My relationship started on the fourth of July," Sheeran detailed during a joint interview for his and Swift's 'End Game' music video in 2018. "I was like, 'Taylor, can she turn up?' and you were like, 'Yep' and then here we are," he said.

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After that, the romance blossomed.

Sheeran said to Zane Lowe on Beats 1: "This has been the first time I've ever actually had the time to fall in love properly. I've always got into relationships very passionately. I'm a redhead and also Irish."

But that same year, Sheeran admitted he'd been struggling with the pressures of fame and a fast-paced lifestyle. He eventually took a break from music after an intervention from loved ones.

"I didn't really notice it was happening. It just started gradually happening, and then some people took me to one side and were like, 'Calm yourself down'," he recalled on Britain's The Jonathan Ross Show.

"It's all fun to begin with, it all starts off as a party and then you're doing it on your own and it's not, so that was a wake-up call. I didn't really have any growing up time into getting famous. All the pitfalls that people read about, I just found myself slipping into all of them. Mostly, like, substance abuse."

Reconnecting with Seaborn, he said, helped pull him back.

"I've rekindled with a girl I went to high school with and we live together now and I think that was a real help grounding me," Sheeran said in 2017. "I was a 25-year-old in the music industry on tour so I just needed someone to balance me out."

The couple reportedly tied the knot in a small ceremony in December 2018. In August 2020, they welcomed their first daughter, Lyra.

Fatherhood, Sheeran says, gave his life a whole new meaning.

"It just feels like what life was meant to be. It's great," he told James Corden on The Late Late Show in June 2021. "I'm healthier than I've ever been. I'm exercising every day ... I'm spending so much time at home making the record. Yeah, I feel like a human being. It's good."

Later that year, on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, he said: "I just found that I really didn't have a purpose outside of [music] because when I was giving myself fixed time of no work, I wasn't doing anything I enjoyed because I love doing music… And [being a dad] has actually given me purpose and something in life that's actually more important than my job."

In May 2022, Sheeran revealed his family had expanded again with the birth of their second daughter, Juniper.

The Sheeran-Seaborn family live a quiet life, and Sheeran has never posted photos of their children — something he's clearly intentional about.

But from everything he's shared, one thing is clear: this family is full of love, and oh so sweet.

Feature image: Getty.