After a lifetime of heartbreak, Gwen Stefani has finally found love and healing

Gwen Stefani has suffered a lot of heartbreak in her life. First there was Tony Kanal, her No Doubt bandmate who ended their seven-year relationship in 1994, leading Stefani to pen the power ballad Don't Speak among several other hits. Then, in 2015, came her devastating divorce from Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale after nearly 13 years of marriage and three children.

But throughout her career, both in No Doubt and as a solo artist, Stefani has repeatedly proven that she has a talent for transforming her suffering into something beautiful. After picking up the pieces of her life, she's now back with her first new album in eight years, Bouquet, which is full of songs dedicated to love and her marriage to country singer Blake Shelton.

"I found love for the first time in my life," Stefani tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "But I didn't know that I wasn't experiencing it until now."

Growing up, Stefani says she looked up to her parents' relationship as the epitome of love and devotion. She assumed that her own romantic life would follow a similar path.

"My parents met when they were 15," she says. "They are just so in love. My whole life, I watched it, you know? I watched them just love each other. And that was my example. So what did I want? I wanted that. I thought that's what we all were going to get … and it just seemed like it was always so impossible for me."

Until Stefani met Shelton while working on The Voice, she felt like she had only experienced one disappointment after another. Kanal, her first serious boyfriend, had been her "obsession," which made their breakup extremely difficult for her to cope with. Ultimately, however, the split paved the way for her to find her voice as a solo artist, inspiring songs like Cool, which chronicles a relationship in which two ex-lovers remain good friends.

"I think that the suffering that I went through with the heartache was my purpose," she says. "At the end of the day, we all have our gift and we all need to use it…. That's why having this new music and being able to share it feels so good."

On Bouquet, Stefani wrote the song Purple Irises to describe her healing journey and relationship with Shelton. She tells Power that while she and her family were exploring the land near Shelton's ranch in Oklahoma, they came across an abandoned homestead that was surrounded by hundreds of purple irises. They decided to transplant the irises to their home where the flowers were able to grow and multiply.

"We took something that someone planted 150 years ago and now they were growing because of us," she says. "There's so much weather and so much reason why those flowers shouldn't have made it, and I just feel like that is so true to my life story."

For Stefani, heartbreak was a necessary part of her "spiritual exercise" that helped her grow and reach countless others with her music.

"You can't really have the light without the dark," she says. "Being able to show how far the love has grown was really important. And it helps to be able to see where I came from, you know, for me to get to this point."

The full interview with Gwen Stefani is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. She talks more about her new album and the early days of No Doubt. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Gwen Stefani produced by Vanessa Nigro.