Diana Ross celebrated her birthday yesterday! 🎉 Wishing her the best years to come. 🌟 Inside her eventful love life and the men she was close to.Read The Full Story In The First Comment 👇💬⤵️

But as with so many great love stories, the glow did not last forever. In a 1999 Time interview, the icon acknowledged that the marriage had reached a turning point. “Sometimes change is not bad,” she said at the time. “Sometimes people come into your life, and then it’s time to make a change.”

She also did not sound especially hopeful about any reconciliation. “I would always like to think there’s a chance,” Ross admitted, “but I have a feeling there’s not.”

Later accounts made it clear that the breakup itself was far from simple. Distance, tension, and painful disputes made things much more complicated than the fairy-tale image people once had of them.

But what keeps this chapter so compelling is the fact that even after their relationship ended in 2000, the singer still called him the “love of my life,” as she said in a 2011 Oprah interview.

Reflecting on what she had learned from their time together, she said, “That love is everlasting. And I love him now.”

Then came the loss that likely made her love even harder to leave behind. Naess died in a mountain climbing accident near Franschhoek, South Africa, in 2004 at the age of 66. His son later shared throwback photos remembering his father and offering a glimpse of that adventurous side.

It is not hard to see why that would stay with Ross. A former husband is one thing. A former husband you still deeply love, who then dies suddenly, is something else entirely. That kind of loss tends to linger, and it may be one of the clearest reasons she never remarried, although there’s another possible explanation.

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My 9-year-old daughter baked 300 Easter cookies for the homeless — the next morning, a stranger showed up at our door with a briefcase full of cash. My daughter, Ashley, has always had a heart too big for her chest. Since my wife died, we’ve barely been making ends meet. We spent everything we had trying to save her from cancer. But when Easter came this year, Ashley told me she’d been saving up her own money to buy ingredients. “For the homeless,” she said. Her mom used to be one of them. She was thrown out by her parents when they found out she was pregnant with Ashley. When I met her, she had nothing — but she had the brightest smile and the sharpest mind I had ever seen. I fell in love with her. I took her and Ashley in. And from that moment on, Ashley became my daughter in every way that matters. So when Ashley said she wanted to help people like her mom once was… I didn’t stop her. For three nights straight, after school and homework, she baked. Her little hands worked nonstop. She found her mom’s old cookie recipe. She rolled every piece of dough herself. She decorated every cookie. She made three hundred cookies. On Easter, she handed them out one by one. She looked people in the eyes. She wished them a Happy Easter. Some of them smiled. Some of them cried. I stood there thinking it was the proudest moment of my life. I thought that was the end of it. The next morning, I was washing a mountain of dishes when the doorbell rang. I opened the door. An older man stood there in a worn-out suit, holding a scratched aluminum briefcase. His eyes were locked on Ashley. Before I could ask anything, he set the case down and opened it. I froze. Stacks of hundred-dollar bills — more money than I had ever seen in my life. “I saw what your daughter did yesterday,” he said, his voice shaking. “I want to give all of this to her.” My heart skipped. Then he added: “But you have to agree to ONE CONDITION.” My chest tightened. “What condition?” I asked. He stepped closer. He lowered his voice. And what he asked for in return made my blood run cold.