It’s seems impossible to consider Gwen Stefani a failure by almost any metric. With pop-icon status, a recurring gig on The Voice, a blissful-seeming relationship with Blake Shelton, a close bond with her kids, and her first No. 1 Billboard album in 2016, the singer appears to be the picture of success. But that didn’t stop Stefani from worrying that her messy, public split from husband Gavin Rossdale marked her as having failed somehow. She recently opened up to Glamour about why their marriage was “extra hard.”

“I don’t think you’ll talk to one person who didn’t make it in a marriage who’s not gonna feel that way,” Stefani said when asked why she kept using the word “embarrassed” to describe her divorce. “The intention of being married is the vow, right? You want to put everything into it to make it a success.” Stefani—who had a Catholic upbringing and still takes her boys to church—was worried about how her 13-year marriage stacked up to her parents’. “All I had to look at was the huge success of my parents: They just had their fiftieth anniversary.”

But Stefani admits that her marriage to Rossdale came with a set of challenges her parents never had to grapple with. “I had to work really hard at marriage, all the time, like everybody, but ours was extra hard,” Stefani says. “When you add that we’re from different countries, both of us being in music, and celebrity. [Marriage] was the one thing I didn’t want to fail at. People can say whatever they want to about me . . . and I don’t get too affected. But I didn’t want them to think I was a failure. There’s nothing weird about how I felt.”

But Stefani—who, after all, is the one who urged teenage girls of the 90s to scream sing “I’ve had it up to here”—dispelled with any failure talk very early on in her post-divorce career. Turning the August 2015 divorce “scandal” into an emotional, musical, and financial triumph by December of that same year, Stefani proved resiliency an unmistakable part of her brand. “Sometimes to be woken up again in life, you need to go through some really bad, hard times,” she tells Glamour. “I feel like I got woken up this year.”