A contrite and emotional Jay-Z has opened up for the first time on how his marriage to Beyonce went to the brink after he cheated on her.
The A-list couple, who were dogged with split rumours after her sister Solange Knowles was caught on camera beating up Jay-Z in a lift, were close to breaking up because of his actions.
And he revealed how it almost "blew up" due to his lies.
In an interview with CNN's Van Jones, he called his wife of nearly 10 years "my soulmate, the person I love".
When asked why his marriage was so special to be worth fighting for, Jay replied: "You can be so in love with someone, and if you have and experienced love and if you don't understand it or have the tools to move forward, then you're going to have complications.
"You can either address it or pretend until it blows up at some point."
He went on: "For us, we chose to fight for our love. For our family. To give our kids a different outcome. To break that cycle for black men and women."
Jay, 48, was the subject of intense speculation when Beyonce's autobiographical album Lemonade dropped in 2016, and contained many of her intimate thoughts and feelings towards her cheating husband.
But he never came clean to the public until late last year, when he finally admitted on his album 4:44 that he'd been a womaniser.
"We were never a celebrity couple - we were a couple that happened to be celebrities. We are real people," he added to CNN.
It came after Jay-Z released his music video for Family Feud, in which he addresses the pain of infidelity as he appears in a confessional booth opposite Beyonce.
Set partly in a church and also featuring the couple's five-year-old daughter Blue Ivy, the video paid tribute to family ties and female empowerment.
"We all lose when the family feuds," Jay-Z sings. "A man that don't take care of his family can't be rich."
Directed by Ava DuVernay, it briefly shows an unidentified couple having sex, until the woman stabs the man in the back.
Within an hour of its release, the video was the top trending item on Twitter.
Jay-Z, 48, confirmed in a New York Times interview in November that he had been unfaithful to Beyonce earlier in their nine-year marriage.
The rapper's soul-baring 4:44 album on love, life and social issues was widely seen as an apology to his wife.
The couple, one of the richest and most influential in the music industry, have reconciled and Beyonce gave birth to their twins in June 2017.
Heavy on symbolism, the eight-minute-long Family Feud video shows the musician walking into a church holding the hand of a white-clad Blue Ivy and taking a seat in the confessional booth.
Beyonce, dressed in a black, priestess-like robe, watches silently from a pulpit and later sits listening on the other side of the confessional screen.
The video also envisions a future in which a grown-up Blue Ivy and other women of colour, portrayed by actresses Mindy Kaling, Rosario Dawson, America Ferrera, Thandie Newton and Niecy Nash, appear to rule the world.
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