Ne-Yo's marriage has been saved by the coronavirus pandemic.

The 40-year-old singer announced in February he was planning to divorce wife Crystal Renay - the mother of his kids Shaffer Jr., four, and two-year-old Roman - but says lockdown measures imposed due to the global health crisis has allowed them time to work on their differences.

He said: ''The whole quarantine thing was kind of a blessing. It allowed me the time to lock back in with [my family].

''Before the quarantine happened, we were definitely talking divorce, and the quarantine forced us to sit still, block out the noise from the world -- you know the world can get very, very loud, and we tend to let the world's opinion mean more in certain situations than it should.''

The 'So Sick' hitmaker - who also has Madilyn, nine, and Mason, eight, from a previous relationship - admitted he and Crystal had had ''uncomfortable'' conversations which were ''blatantly, painfully, brutally honest'' to resolve their issues, and while he admitted such ''difficult'' discussions can be harmful, they found them beneficial.

Speaking on 'The Talk', he added: ''We're actually stronger now than we were before. Now we feel like we can really talk to each other.''

The couple had reached a point in their relationship where they found themselves unable to open up to one another in order to work through their problems.

Ne-Yo said: ''I don't know when it happened, but we got to a place where we felt like we couldn't just say it, you know.

''You're feeling something -- something's going on, and you know something's going on, but for whatever reason, you can't just come out and say it.

''We got to that place, and that almost broke us.''