Oprah

Winfrey doesn’t think she and Stedman Graham would still be together if they

had got married.

The couple

have been together since 1968, and she’s thankful her partner has always

allowed to “be who [she] needs to be”, as she thinks their

relationship would have changed if they had made their union official as she’d

have felt too restricted.

“I used to

think about this all the time, that I was working these 17-hour days, and so

were my producers, and then I go home and I have my two dogs and I have

Stedman, who’s letting me be who I need to be in the world,” she said.

“He’s

never demanding anything from me like, ‘Where’s my breakfast? Where’s my

dinner?’ Never any of that, which I believed would have changed had we married.

No question about it — we would not stay married, because of what that would

have meant to him, and I would have had my own ideas about it. I have not had

one regret about that.”

The

65-year-old star admitted there was a point when she thought about having

children.

She told People magazine: “At one point in Chicago I had bought an additional apartment because I was thinking, ‘Well, if we get married, I’m going to need room for children.” However, she witnessed the “depth of responsibility and sacrifice that is actually required to be a mother” while working on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and it caused her to have a change of heart.