Get ready to weep for what could have been, Full House fans: John Stamos considered dating Lori Loughlin before he met ex-wife Rebecca Romijn.
Stamos, 60, recalled his and Loughlin’s near-miss love connection in his memoir, If You Would Have Told Me, which hit shelves on Tuesday, October 24. According to Stamos, he and Loughlin, 59, found themselves “suddenly single at the same time” in the mid-1990s.
“She’s my Sandra Dee from Grease, the good girl with a kind heart who always makes me feel upbeat when I’m around her,” Stamos wrote of Loughlin. “She’s one of the few women I have spent day after day with and still always look forward to seeing her again. I know what makes her laugh, we get each other and we have the sort of true friendship that’s supposed to be the foundation of a great, lasting relationship.”
Loughlin and Stamos became friends while working together on Full House, which ran from 1987 to 1995. Stamos played Jesse Katsopolis, while Loughlin played his love interest and later wife, Rebecca Donaldson.
In 1994, Stamos met Romijn, 50, at an afterparty for a Victoria’s Secret fashion show that Romijn walked in as a model. While Stamos attended the party with Loughlin, he ended up getting Romijn’s number. “[She’s] the Sandy-in-Black-Leather at the end of Grease,” Stamos wrote of Romijn.
Loughlin, meanwhile, caught on to the fact that Stamos couldn’t look away from Romijn and her fellow models. “Lori has had my number the whole time,” Stamos continued. “As each leggy beauty walks down the runway, she shoots me a knowing look and maintains a little smirk. She knows I’m not as ready to settle down as I feel. She’s humoring me.”
Stamos recalled asking himself to choose between the two women with a further reference to Grease. “Am I going to sit in a swing forlorn at the drive-in wearing a motorcycle jacket warbling like John Travolta for Sandra Dee or am I putting on the letterman’s sweater to enter the carnival in search of black patent leather stilettos with chills multiplying?” he wrote. “Let’s just say Rebecca’s first call sounds a lot like, ‘Tell me about it, Stud,’ and it’s electrifying.”
Romijn and Stamos tied the knot in September 1998 after getting engaged on Christmas Eve the year prior. The former couple announced their split in April 2004 after five years of marriage. He later married Caitlin McHugh in February 2018, while Romijn wed Jerry O’Connell in 2007. Stamos and McHugh, 37, share son Billy, 5, and Romijn and O’Connell, 49, are the parents of 13-year-old twins Dolly and Charlie.
Loughlin, for her part, went on to marry Mossimo Giannulli in 1997. The duo share daughters Isabella, 25, and Olivia Jade, 24.
Stamos has previously said that he and Loughlin went on a date in their late teens after meeting because of their work on soap operas. “We went on a date to Disneyland before … we were both married,” he told HuffPost in 2013. “We did have some off timing, but — no disrespect to her family and her husband now — I would say that she could be the one that got away.”
If You Would Have Told Me is available now wherever books are sold.
