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Singer Bobby Brown is opening up for the first time since the sudden death of his ex-wife Whitney Houston and putting to rest some big rumors about their troubled marriage, reports TV Guide.

In an interview with Matt Lauer set to air Wednesday and Thursday on Today, Brown says that he was not the person who got Houston addicted to drugs. “It makes me feel terrible,” Brown says of the rumors, which stemmed from Houston’s squeaky clean image prior to marrying Brown in 1992. According to E! Online, Brown says “but I know differently.”

Brown claims that prior to marrying Houston he only drank alcohol and smoked marijuana and insists he “wasn’t the one who got Whitney on drugs at all.” Brown continues: “I think if anyone ever knew us, if anybody ever spent time around us instead of time lookin’ through the bubble, they would know how we felt about each other. They would know how happy we were together.”

Brown says it was the family’s short-lived time in front of the reality cameras for 2005’s Being Bobby Brown that showed the negative impact drugs had had on their marriage. “The reality show gave us a wake-up, because we saw each other in—we looked at the bubble and saw ourselves,” Brown says. “We was able to see what other people were saying about us, you know? We was able to see that our drug use had affected our relationship, had affected the love that we felt for each other.”

Brown and Houston split a year after the show wrapped and divorced in 2007. Brown says he had believed that Houston had put her drug use behind her. He says he was “hurt” to hear that she had cocaine in her system when she died on February 11 at the age of 48. “Me being off of narcotics for the last seven years…I felt that she was…I didn’t know she was struggling with it still,” Brown says. “It’s a hard fight to, you know, maintain sobriety that way.”

Despite the turbulent times in their relationship and its ultimate demise, Brown still loves the mother of their 19-year-old daughter Bobbi Kristina. “I can honestly say that I love that woman with…everything that I am,” he says. “And I believe she loved me the same way. We wouldn’t have been able to make the most beautiful girl in the world without love. And that’s the truth.”