NEED TO KNOW

• Heidi Klum is pulling back the curtain on her marriage to German rocker husband Tom Kaulitz

• Klum reveals she doesn’t “listen too much about what people are saying” when it comes to the couple’s 17-year age gap

• The couple wed in 2019 less than a year after they started dating

Heidi Klum didn’t go looking for her third husband Tom Kaulitz. She almost didn’t even go out the night she met the German rocker seven years ago.

“I really wanted to stay home,” the 52-year-old supermodel tells PEOPLE exclusively in our new cover story, on newsstands now. “I was working all day, … But then I gave myself a little kick in the butt.” That small decision—to show up for a friend at a party — became what she now calls “the sliding door moment” of her life. The couple got engaged in December of 2018 and married two months later, followed by a wedding party and celebration in Italy in August 2019.

The Tokio Hotel bassist, 35, represented a “clean slate,” for the mom of four, who first married celebrity hairstylist Ric Pipino in 1997 followed by a seven-year marriage to musician Seal which ended in 2012.

“[At first] I wanted to [project] what I had learned from different men I had been with… like ‘Ooh, this reminds me of something that happened, is that a flag?’” she says of bringing in baggage from past relationships. “But Tom said, ‘Don’t do this to me, because I’m not this person, I’m not that person. Scratch everything. I have to have a fair chance.’”

The couple isn’t shy about sharing their connection with the world on social media, giving a glimpse at their vacations together and PDA. One of their favorite outings? Shopping for lingerie together. “He  loves sitting there and I go into the changing room and I come out with a different outfit on,” she says, noting that there is zero jealousy between them. “He loves me in a mini skirt. He loves me in pumps. He just loves when I get all dolled up.” They’ve even tattooed their names on one another, Klum saying with a laugh: “His looks much better — so I’m the better tattoo artist.”

The couple’s relationship began in 2018. After they got engaged in December 2018, they tied the knot in secret just two months later in 2019, before later celebrating their wedding in Capri, Italy on Aug. 5, 2019.

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The soon-returning Project Runway host tells PEOPLE about how her husband supports her being the most authentic version of herself.

“He’s not against makeup, but if I have nothing on he likes that too. He also loves when I get all dolled up. And he loves sitting there and I go into the changing room and I come out with a different outfit, and he’s like, ‘Yeah!’ and then he gets me different fun outfits, for example,” Klum says.

She adds with a wink: “There are a tons of things that I can’t talk about that we do.”

The model also opens up to PEOPLE about how she feels about the public response to her 17-year age gap relationship. “I think more and more it’s accepted to be an older woman with a younger man, it wasn’t really that you would see it a lot, but I feel like now you see it more and more,” Klum says.

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“When our door closes at home and when we’re good, I don’t really care so much what happens around us,” she adds. “I’ve learned things from my husband that I didn’t know I was capable of doing. I feel like it’s important to live in the moment, enjoy each other, be fair to each other and love one another, and then you see how things are going.”

Stay tuned for more from our exclusive interview and photo shoot with Klum ahead of Project Runway‘s hotly anticipated season 21 premiere on Freeform, Hulu and Disney+ starting Thursday, July 31.

Read the original article on People