When it comes to keeping her marriage harmonious, Carrie Underwood talks a good game. Asked how she and hockey playing husband Mike Fisher maintain the spark seven years into their marriage, the singer told Us Weekly they make it a point to focus on communication. “It just needs to be in the forefront of your mind,” she said.
It can be easy to get bogged down in chatter about kids, she admitted (they share 2-year-old son Isaiah) or to feel too exhausted to put work into the relationship. “There’s always stuff to do,” she noted. “I get home and I’m tired and I’m making dinner and trying to get Isaiah to bed.” But it’s crucial to make that time to connect with your partner, she stressed: “It’s important to just realize, ‘Let’s put our phones down. Let’s have a conversation.’”
Never was that more important than this winter. Just five months after declaring an end to his 17-year NHL career, which he called “the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” Ontario, Canada, native Fisher, 37, started second-guessing his choice.
“Once his body and mind healed, he sat at home and realized he just missed it,” a hockey insider explains in the new issue of Us Weekly. “You go from years of playing every day and being on the road with the same group of guys to a normal life. It’s hard to adjust.”
Underwood understood his anguish. Though on hiatus from her own successful career — she’s nabbed seven Grammys, 12 Academy of Country Music Awards and is a three-time CMT Artist of the Year — due to a November fall she said left her “not quite looking the same,” the 34-year-old singer pushed him to hit the road.
“Carrie encouraged Mike to come out of retirement and believed in him all the way,” notes a source close to the pair. “She wants him to be happy and knew he should go for it. He asked for her blessing and totally got it. She’s behind him with whatever he chooses to do.”
It just may be a while before she’s enthusiastically rooting from the stands. In November — just a day after she co-hosted the CMA Awards November 8 — the singer took a tumble down a set of stone steps outside their home. “It’s crazy how a freak random accident can change your life,” Underwood later wrote in a post to members of her fan club, detailing that she broke her wrist and severely injured her face. “When I came out of surgery the night of my fall, the doctor told Mike that he had put between 40 and 50 stitches in.”
And while the singer noted she wasn’t sure how healing would go, “I am grateful that it wasn’t much, much worse. And I am grateful for the people in my life that have been there every step of the way.”
Chief among them is Fisher, who’s helped nurse her back to health. “They are so loving and supportive of one another,” says the source close to them. “Usually couples have some sort of issues, but they seem rock solid.”
For more on the pair’s union, pick up the new issue of Us Weekly, on stands now!
