Dennis Quaid Talks About Coping with Divorce and Finding 'The Love of My Life' (Exclusive)

When Dennis Quaid is asked about his life as husband to Laura Savoie, the actor only needs one word: “Heaven.” 

“Laura's the love of my life,” The Parent Trap star, 69, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “She came along and we have a bond with one another that I never had with anybody else before.

“I like waking up together. I like every moment of the day because we can do just simple stuff and it makes it worthwhile. It's a joy of life that we share together.”

Christian faith, he adds, is one key to the success of his relationship with St. Louis native Savoie, 30. “God is in the relationship,” says Quaid, a longtime musician who's releasing a gospel album, Fallen: A Gospel Record for Sinners, this week. “I've never had a relationship like that before. She's super smart. She's a CPA and she's got this master's degree.”

The star of this year’s Max limited series Full Circle and biographical drama On a Wing and a Prayer began dating Savoie in May 2019 and proposed in Hawaii that fall. The couple eloped in Santa Barbara in June 2020 amid the COVID pandemic’s derailment of their initial wedding plans.

Quaid was previously married to P.J. Soles from 1978 to 1983, Meg Ryan from 1991 to 2001 and Kimberly Buffington from 2004 to 2018. He shares son Jack (who starred in Oppenheimer and last year’s Scream) with Ryan, and twins Thomas and Zoe with Buffington. 

“Family is the center of everything,” Quaid, who splits his time between Nashville and L.A., tells PEOPLE. When asked about the highly public split from his D.O.A. costar Ryan in 2000, the actor admits the level of scrutiny made for a complicated divorce. 

“There’d be vans outside of my house with listening devices,” he remembers. “It was the very height of Meg’s career back then, but I look back at it and it's taught me patience, I guess.”

He calls his relationship with Ryan now a “friendly” one. “We talk about once a year. She has another life, and I do too. I think we both respect that.”

Quaid says that among the many lessons learned from his past relationships, chief among them is how “to let go of a lot of things. I think you have to prepare a table for love and tend to it. That’s what love is.”

He continues: “That’s what Laura and I have. I was ready to meet her, and I don’t know why God had it that we met at the time that we did, but it’s it for me. It’s great.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

And although there’s an “age difference” between him and Savoie, he acknowledges, “we just never noticed it right from the very beginning and just had to go with it — happiest I've ever been.”

In 2020, on the heels of their intimate wedding ceremony, Savoie told PEOPLE about how she finds strength in “the wisdom that Dennis has… We both had to go through things to be who we are now and who we are now was ready for each other.”

She also said their shared religious faith helps both “be the people we're supposed to be towards each other… It brings you back to being loving and kind towards each other and working through those things that inevitably come up. And it's just the greatest source of strength in our relationship to have, to share that."

The couple’s perfect date night these days? “Going out to Giovanni's here in Nashville,” Quaid says. “It's a real Italian restaurant here. It's fabulous… We just have fun together.”

For more on Dennis Quaid, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.