David Justice Gets Candid About Ending His Marriage to Halle Berry: ‘This the Woman I Want to Have Kids with

David Justice is opening up about the end of his marriage to Halle Berry.

Speaking on Matt Barnes’ All the Smoke podcast on Thursday, Aug. 7, the former MLB star reflected on the challenges he and Berry, 58, faced that ultimately led to their 1997 divorce.

Justice, 59, recalled that the relationship was still in a “honeymoon state” for the first few months after their 1993 wedding. That changed about five months in, when he started thinking about starting a family.

“My knowledge and my understanding, my wisdom around relationships just wasn’t vast,” he admitted. “I’m a Midwest guy, so I’m looking at my mom and thinking a wife at that time should cook, clean — be traditional, you know?”

He said he began asking himself: If we have kids, is this the woman I want to build a family with? “At that time, as a young guy — she don’t cook, don’t clean, don’t really seem motherly — and then we start having issues.”

The former Atlanta Braves player said the couple didn’t face much “negative attention until I decided to leave her in 1996.”

Justice also revealed that Berry proposed to him after they had known each other for just five months. “I said OK because I couldn’t say no. Who’s going to say no at that time? I don’t know if my heart was really into it, but I didn’t want to make her feel bad.”

Their differences deepened over time, especially when their careers kept them apart. “She was doing movies in this country, that country,” Justice recalled. “We honestly probably could have made it if I knew about therapy. If we knew about therapy, we probably could have made it.”

He emphasized that there were no major scandals behind the split — just youthful inexperience. “I had only been in one real relationship before her,” he said.

Representatives for Berry did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

Berry, now in a relationship with singer-songwriter Van Hunt, has publicly addressed perceptions about her love life in the past. While on The Drew Barrymore Show in February, she responded to the notion that she “can’t keep a man” by saying, “Who’s to say I want to keep a man? I don’t want to keep the wrong man… We all make mistakes, and we have the right to say, ‘This was a mistake. Let me start again.’”

In June, Hunt, 55 — who went public with Berry in September 2020 — told Today.com that he had proposed, though Berry hadn’t officially accepted. “I put out the proposal, and it’s still on hold,” he shared.

Berry added, “I think we will get married just because… this is the person I should have married. We want that expression.” She hinted the wedding could happen “soon.”

Berry was previously married to Olivier Martinez, splitting in 2015, and to singer/actor Eric Benét before that. She shares daughter Nahla, 17, with ex Gabriel Aubry, and son Maceo-Robert, 11, with Martinez.