When Alicia Keys first met her husband Swizz Beatz, she couldn't stand to be around him.

When Alicia Keys was just a teenager she met a boy named Swizz Beatz.

She immediately hated him.

“Honestly, I didn’t really like him that much,” she later told Marie Claire UK. “I thought he was too ostentatious.”

“Swizz will have the fastest car, the biggest jewellery, the loudest jacket,” she explained. “Everything with him is really over the top. I used to see him and think, ‘He is so annoying’.”

After several attempts by Keys’ management to get her to work with Swizz Beatz, whose real name is Kasseem Dean, the two finally got together in the studio. And they just clicked.

“I fought it tooth and nail,” she told Marie Claire UK. “Why should I work with him? Finally, though, we did it and we had a ball.”

The pair began dating in 2008, while Swizz Beatz was still married to his first wife, Mashonda Tifrere. The ex-couple share a son together who they named Kasseem Dean Jr.

 

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The Village… so happy we are able to give him this gift… BLEND

A post shared by Mashonda (@mashondatifrere) on Dec 22, 2018 at 5:49pm PST

At the time, Swizz Beatz claimed he was separated from Tifrere, however she told a different story.

“My concern with [Alicia Keys] is no longer the fact that she assisted in destroying a family but that she has the audacity to make these selfish comments about love and wanting to be with someone, even after knowing their situation,” she wrote, according to Vibe.

“I feel that after [one] and a half years of you hiding this affair and acting like it [doesn’t] exist, that now is the time to confront it, since you talk so openly about it now… You have no idea how much pain I was caused because of this affair.”

Before he began dating Keys, Swizz Beatz also had a brief affair with Jahna Sebastian, a London-based singer. Sebastian became pregnant and the pair had a daughter together who Sebastian named Nicole.

The hip hop artist also has a son named Prince Nasir with Nicole Levy, who he dated briefly after he met Tifrere. For years, Beatz was locked in bitter custody battles with his exes as they worked out child support.

Keys and Swizz Beatz announced their engagement in May 2010, and married just two months later.

In October of the same year, they welcomed their first child together, a son who they named Egypt Daoud Dean.

Four years later, in December 2014, the pair welcomed their second son, Genesis Ali Dean.

 

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{Family portrait } ♥ My favourite picture of this family???????? All the family is here except Nicole???? It was 2 years ago???? Nasir was 16, Kasseem 10, Egy 6 and baby Gen was 2????

A post shared by The Best Family Ever???????? (@family_dean) on Jan 3, 2019 at 9:15am PST

These days, things are a lot calmer between Keys, Beatz and his exes. In 2016, Keys released a song called Blended Family, in which she sang about her relationship with her stepchildren and their mothers.

In 2018, Tifrere wrote a book called Blend: The Secret to Co-Parenting and Creating a Balanced Family, with the help of Beatz and Keys.

When Keys hosts this year’s Grammy Awards, Beatz will be there supporting her all the way.

“There’s a lot that goes into actually running a show. It makes me actually appreciate the Grammys a little bit more,” he told Market Watch.

“We can sit and watch and judge from the side, but the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes — they got all my respect. To take that show, and for her to twist it her way and just watch all the creative and be apart of the creativity has been monumental. It’s going to be big. We’ve got some surprises happening. Here she comes.”