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Every romance has a beginning. Whether it’s sweet, funny or messy, it’s fascinating to learn the story of how people met or got together, or what happened on their first dates. Join Wonderwall.com as we take a look back at how some of our favorite famous current and former couples got together…
Less than two months after filing to divorce actress Sofia Vergara in July 2023, Joe Manganiello stepped out with a new woman — actress Caitlin O’Connor. Days after the pair were photographed leaving a Gold’s Gym in Venice, California, together in September 2023, People magazine revealed how the “True Blood” and “Magic Mike” actor and the beauty got together.
A source told the magazine that Joe and Caitlin met at a small, “unofficial” afterparty for “Winning Time,” the HBO drama series about the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team in the ’80s on which Caitlin plays actress Dyan Cannon.
“The first time they met [was] in the hot tub and they were talking the whole time,” the source said, adding that Caitlin and Joe hit it off and in the weeks since have been “casually seeing each other.”
Keep reading for more celebrity meet-cute and first date stories …
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“Game of Thrones” actress Sophie Turner was not a fan of Joe Jonas’s band before she fell for the singer and married him. “There was this band in the U.K. called Busted. They had a hit called ‘Year 3000.’ It was amazing, and [my friends and I] were huge Busted fans. Then the Jonas Brothers covered the song and made it massive. And Busted broke up. We thought it was all the Jonas Brothers’ fault. So we hated them,” she told ELLE magazine in 2020.
Then in 2016, a producer on one of her films who’d once lived next door to the JoBros told her, “You should meet Joe Jonas. I feel like you would really get along with this guy.” Shortly after that, “I went to a meeting, and Joe’s agent was in the room. And he was like, ‘You remind me of one of my clients. I bet you two would really hit it off,'” she recalled.
Later that year, Sophie told ELLE, Joe sent her a DM on Instagram out of the blue — he was going to be in Britain and wanted to meet up. “When I told my friends, they were like, ‘That’s hilarious. You have to do it! And you have to text us everything he says,'” she said. “I expected him to show up with security and everything. I thought, ‘He’s gonna be such a d***,'” she told ELLE. “I brought all my guy friends to come with me to meet him, because in the back of my mind I still worried that he could be a catfish — or I don’t know what. I just wanted my guy friends with me. I had my rugby boys. I was safe.”
They met at a bar in London’s Camden area and Joe didn’t bring security — just a friend — “and they drank just as hard as the rest of us,” Sophie recalled. “I remember the two of us spending only a couple of minutes on the dance floor, and then we just found a space far in the corner and we just talked. We talked for hours and hours and hours. And I was, like, not bored. It wasn’t contrived. It wasn’t small talk — it was just so easy. And soon we were, like, inseparable. I went on tour with him.”
They then got engaged on their one-year anniversary in 2017, wed in 2019 and welcomed two daughters before things went south in 2023 and Joe filed for divorce.
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Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters met his fifth wife, Kamilah Chavis — whom he married in October 2021 after five years of dating — when she worked as his driver. “I actually met her at one of my concerts a couple of years ago. She worked in transportation. She was driving the car that was taking me [around],” the rock star told Infobae in 2018, as reported by Page Six, which further reported the couple met at the 2016 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. “I was in one place for two weeks and there were many transfers between the hotel and the venue. My security sat in the front with her and they talked, while I stayed in the back. I don’t know, something about her attracted me…” He soon made his move. “One day I said ‘Excuse me,’ and she turned around. [I said], ‘Did someone ever tell you that you have beautiful cheekbones?’ I saw a little reaction, and that was the beginning.”
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A 25-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis was sitting in her living room with “Halloween” co-writer Debra Hill in the spring of 1984 flipping through an issue of Rolling Stone magazine when she saw a photo of British screenwriter, composer and comedy star Christopher Guest. “I’m going to marry that man,” she told her friend, recounting the moment in O, the Oprah Magazine years later. Debra told her who he was, that he was in a funny new movie called “This is Spinal Tap,” and that she knew his agent. A day later, Jamie Lee “called the agent, gave him my number, and told him to have Chris call me if he was interested. I waited. Chris never called.”
That summer, Jamie Lee walked into Hugo’s restaurant in West Hollywood to have dinner with friends and saw Chris sitting three tables away. They waved at one another in awkward acknowledgment and he soon left. “The next day, on June 28, the phone rang. On July 2, Chris and I had our first date at Chianti Ristorante on Melrose. And by Aug. 8, when he left to tape a year of ‘Saturday Night Live’ in New York City, we’d fallen in love,” she told the magazine. They got married just a few months later on Dec. 18 at the home of pal Rob Reiner.
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Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis was a naval officer — a new lawyer assigned to the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) — when he met his now wife, Florida first lady Casey DeSantis (née Black), at a golf course in 2006. He thought she was looking over at him, but Casey claimed she was just eyeing his bucket of practice golf balls. “I used the balls as a way to start talking to her,” Ron admitted in a March 2023 “Piers Morgan Uncensored” interview. “So we started talking, we divvied up the balls and we hit ’em. And then we went out after that and the rest is history, but I think in fact she was looking at the balls. I do think I was wrong!” The politician still marvels at the story of how they met. “Who would have thought that we both would have been there at the same time randomly on some random day in 2006,” he said. “I’m just fresh into the Navy and she’s a local TV reporter at the time, and we just happened to hit it off.”
Ron said he knew early on that Casey was worth pursuing. “I was like, ‘This is different,’ and I made sure to court her,” he said. “Of course, I got mobilized to Iraq, so we stayed together through all that, but I told myself, ‘As soon as I get back from Iraq, I’m popping the question,’ and so we ended up doing that.” He also revealed how he proposed. “I took her to a nice little resort in Florida and we were out on the balcony, and I had a nice ring, and I just dropped to the knee and asked her,” he shared. “She’d let it be known that she was happy and that we were ready to go to the next level, so, I don’t think it was a super shock, but it was good to get that one in the win column, and I don’t think I could have done any better in life. Not just to have a friend, we have three wonderful kids, she’s a great mother, she’s a great first lady. She’s really the whole package.” They married in 2009 at Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort.
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Hulk Hogan met yoga instructor Sky Daily in early 2022. While out on the town, he sent a drink over to a group of women Sky was with, he revealed while recounting their meet-cute during a speech he made at a friend’s wedding, The Los Angeles Times reported. When one of the ladies came over to the wrestling icon to say thank you, he quipped, “Who’s the blonde?” Hulk and Sky sat down and talked for a bit before he left, figuring he’d go home to do laundry or something mundane. “And then when I got in my car, there was just bang, bang, bang, bang on the window. It scared the hell out of me, so I put the window down,” he continued. Sky’s friend “stuck her head in my car,” he said, and urged Hulk to call the yoga instructor, adding, “She’s a nice girl!” According to Hulk, “It made me think twice about just ghosting and going home and never calling.” They soon started dating and got engaged in July 2023.
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“The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Kyle Richards and husband Mauricio Umansky, the founder and CEO of high-end real estate brokerage The Agency, opened up to The Knot in November 2021 about how they met nearly three decades earlier at a Hollywood nightclub when he mistook her for Demi Moore’s sister. “He worked up the courage to come over and say hello, thinking that I was her sister,” Kyle recalled. Chimed in her hubby, “I figured if I couldn’t get Demi Moore, I could try to get her sister!” The duo then agreed that the real estate mogul “got something way better” with Kyle.
“Other than the fact that she is absolutely gorgeous, she has an amazing soul. She’s an amazing person. And quite honestly, the fact that she already had a daughter [Farrah, from her first marriage], it made dating a lot more important,” Mauricio explained. “I had to take it much more seriously because I was responsible for a woman with a daughter. I also got insight into the way that she was as a mom and how good of a mom she was. And that gave me insight into the future and what it would look like.” Added the mother of four, “The moment we started dating, I just felt like he was the one.”
The long-term couple also dished on their engagement, revealing that Mauricio popped the question at a restaurant in Santa Monica and gave Farrah her own engagement ring because he “had to ask her to marry me too” — and wedding, which they moved up three months so Kyle’s dress “would still fit” when she unexpectedly got pregnant with daughter Alexia.
In June 2023, People magazine reported that Kyle and Mauricio separated.
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Prompted by inquiring fans eager to learn more about her romance with ex Al Pacino, actress Beverly D’Angelo took to Instagram in May 2023 to share the story of how they met and what happened after they split. “I lived with Al for seven years and we have two children,” the star of the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” films began. “In 1996, we were on the same plane going from Los Angeles to New York. He was seated in front of me [and] he said, ‘Come up and sit beside me.’ And by the time the plane landed, it was on.” The following year, the Oscar winner took a big step. “In 1997, he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I want you to be the mother of my children,'” Beverly shared, “and although I’d avoided that role my whole life, I was deeply in love and I was 100% in. We did our first round of in vitro in ’97 and a few years later, with a lot of effort and the miracles of modern science, this happened,” she continued, as photos of their twins, Anton and Olivia, flashed on the screen.
After welcoming their children in 2001, “Yikes, it got complicated,” Beverly admitted, adding that “our split was finalized in 2004.” But their story didn’t end there. “The power of our love for our children was the basis for resolving any conflicts and creating a new history as co-parents, leading individual lives separately but always intertwined as a family,” she said. “As for me and Al, it is a unique and profound friendship between two artists that endures to this day, through thick and thin 27 years now of doing it our way.”
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“Eight Is Enough” star Willie Aames found his true love in a former childhood fan, Winnie Hung, with whom he had a pen pal relationship for three decades. “Winnie had started sending me letters when she was just a kid. I used to receive thousands of letters a week. I used to pick letters out of the bag and I would read a couple of them and they’d always put their phone number there. … And I was thinking, ‘These poor girls. They’re never going to get a phone call from somebody.’ So I thought, ‘I’m going to do it. I’m going to call,'” Willie told People magazine, which shared photos of him with Winnie today, in August 2022. He picked Winnie’s letter out of a stack and rang her family’s home. They spoke and soon became pen pals. “We never met but chatted on the phone a few times. We’d catch up, lose track, catch up, and lose track,” Willie said, explaining that they lost touch for a period during which he struggled with addiction and was even homeless.
After he started his life over at 48 and began working as a cruise director for Oceana, Winnie — who’s about 12 years his junior — reached out via social media and they decided to finally meet each other during a cruise stop in Vancouver. “That afternoon, I took one look at her and I knew,” Willie told People. They married less than a year later in 2014. “I feel like everything worked out timing-wise, the way it was supposed to be,” Winnie — an actress and producer — told People. “I never once, ever in a million years thought he would be the one. It was such an innocent writing back and forth.” In 2022, Hallmark aired “Love in the Limelight” starring real-life couple Alexa PenaVega and Carlos PenaVega, which is loosely based on Willie and Winnie’s love story.
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Famed former adult film actress and memoir author Jenna Jameson married “Born Lawless” podcast host Jessi Lawless at the Little Church of the West in Las Vegas in May 2023 after about five months of dating. The women first connected in 2022 when Jenna started seeing and commenting on Jessi’s TokTok posts. “I was crushing on Jessi for a long time because she’s quite large on TikTok and I love TikTok. I just scroll at night when I’m trying to calm down, and I just loved her perspective on things, I related to it. So I just started mass commenting her trying to get her attention, and it seemed to have worked,” Jenna told People magazine.
But Jessi had a girlfriend at the time and her “moral compass,” she said, didn’t allow her to act on Jenna’s advances. However, after that relationship ended, she responded to Jenna and they started dating in January 2023, they told People. “I knew I would get what I wanted,” Jenna added. “She was worth it. But she presented a challenge and I’m very driven when it comes to challenges, so I knew I just had to lie and wait. And she came back around.” Jessi never expected that they’d be married just months later. “I was like, maybe she just wants to have some casual encounters,” she told People. “But I’m happy that it went to a more serious level, and I’ve never been so comfortable with anyone.”
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“Outer Banks” hunk Chase Stokes and country music singer Kelsea Ballerini’s romance was confirmed in January 2023 after they were pictured at a college football game, holding hands in Nashville and sharing PDA at a Los Angeles airport. On a February 2023 episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Kelsea — who divorced country singer Morgan Evans in the summer of 2022 — revealed she and Chase, who split from co-star Madelyn Cline in 2021, started spending time together in December 2022. “I was ready to open back up. I just felt, why not? I’ve never really dated; I don’t know how it works. I’m like, ‘Let’s just put ourselves out there; let’s just vibe.’ And it’s been fun,” she said, explaining that she pursued Chase by sliding into his DMs after they began following each other on Instagram.
“He shoots [‘Outer Banks’] in Charleston, and my manager lives there, and he, like, put the bug in my ear. He’s like, ‘You know who’s really cute when you’re ready? Chase.’ I was like, ‘You’re so right,'” Kelsea said. “I’ve never seen the show, but I just knew of him. And so I followed him, and he followed me, and I just swan-dove right on in.” Asked what she said in that first message, she admitted she kept it simple: “His handle is ‘@hichasestokes,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Chase Stokes.'”
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“Belfast” and “Fifty Shades of Grey” star Jamie Dornan met musician-composer and former actress Amelia Warner in 2010. “I was smitten with her from the start, I really was,” he told the Belfast Telegraph in 2015. But in May 2022, the Northern Irish actor shared with The Daily Mail that he could have blown it on their first date thanks to his curious attire: He showed up at her place in Los Angeles wearing a Christmas sweater — in February. “I was worried that she wouldn’t remember me. I felt I should make myself memorable,” he said. “And I still remember seeing her reaction when she opened the door. I could tell she got the point of me and liked me, even though she probably thought I was a bit weird.” They wed in 2013 and have since welcomed three daughters.
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In 1983, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell were shooting the WWII-era movie “Swing Shift,” in which Kurt played a trumpet player. But his moves needed some work so Goldie suggested they go somewhere and dance to swing music. “The Playboy Club was the only place that had that,” Kurt recalled during a 2017 interview on Harry Connick Jr.’s talk show. “So we went to the Playboy Club and I just, immediately, was having a great time with this girl, Goldie… [But] there was no place to dance.” They left, Kurt explained, and “we both agreed the night wasn’t over yet.” He then admitted, “It’s one of those stories that kind of sounds like, ‘Gee, that was fast.’ Well, it was. It happened fast.” The next thing they knew, they were at the house Goldie was renovating — which happens to be where daughter Kate Hudson now lives. “We eventually found our way upstairs looking around at imaginary furniture and we were in the imaginary bedroom now and we’re realistically having sex when the police walked in,” he said, laughing. “We had to break into the place to get in so the next thing I [see] is a flashlight and Goldie and I are like, ‘What?’ It was bizarre and weird.” The cops told them to get a hotel room, which they did. “That was our first date,” he added. “It was a lot of fun. I can’t believe it was a long time ago.”
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Jodie Turner-Smith and Joshua Jackson are now married with a child, but they never expected such a happy ending when they first hooked up. “So when I first met my husband, it was kind of… we had a one-night stand,” the actress, who was first linked to the “Dawson’s Creek” star in 2018, confessed during an appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in May 2021. “We’re in a two-, three-year one-night stand now.” She went on to share that sparks first flew at a party. “First of all, I saw him before he saw me and when I saw him, I was like, ‘I want that,'” she explained. “And then when he saw me, I just pretended like I didn’t see him. He had to yell across the room to me.”
She was wearing a T-shirt that had been worn by a character named Detroit in the movie “Sorry to Bother You” and Josh recognized it. “And so he shouts across the room, ‘Detroit!’ He comes over and he’s like, “Hey,” and does this really cute, charming thing that he does and just all night — he just basically followed me around the party.”
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Miranda Lambert has her Pistol Annies bandmates to thank for introducing her to Brendan McLoughlin, who was an NYPD officer. “I met my husband doing press for the Pistol Annies record, this time last year,” the country music star told The New York Times in late October 2019. “Our record came out the day after Halloween, and we [performed on] ‘Good Morning America’ [on Nov. 2]. My husband was doing security there for the show.” Friends and bandmates Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley “saw him and knew I might be ready to hang out with someone,” added Miranda, who’d broken up with Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker several months earlier. “They invited him to our show [later that night] behind my back. They plucked him for me… My security guy Tom, he was in on it too. He said to me, ‘He’s here. And he’s pretty.'” Miranda quietly married Brendan in Tennessee less than three months later.
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“Stranger Things” star David Harbour and British pop singer Lily Allen struck many as an unexpected pairing when they took their romance public in 2019, a little more than a year before they tied the knot in Las Vegas in 2020. In July 2022, the world learned how their relationship started: They met on the ultra-exclusive dating app Raya. “I was in London alone, doing ‘Black Widow,’ on this app, going on dates and stuff. And yeah, I started texting with her, she was in Italy at the time — we got together, went on a date at the Wolseley [restaurant in London], and it was, you know, she’s f****** unbelievable,” David told GQ Hype in July 2002.
They fell for each other hard and fast. “She claims to have fallen in love at first sight with me — I mean, who wouldn’t?” he quipped before sharing when he fell in love with her. “I remember the exact moment. It was our third date. I was just in this phase where I was like, I’m just going to be brutally honest about everything, because why lie? And I told her something about my life, about my beliefs…” he said, adding, “It would take a really extraordinary person to be accepting of the things that I said. And I remember thinking: Wow, that’s somebody I want to be around.”
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Kaley Cuoco said “it was absolutely love at first sight” when she met “Ozark” actor Tom Pelphrey. “We have the same management team. My manager actually took me as her guest to the ‘Ozark’ [season 4, part 2] premiere [in April 2022] and I met him there. It was like the angels started singing. I was like, ‘Hallelujah!’ It was very magical. It was perfect,” she later gushed to “Extra,” adding that she “met Tom at the right moment” after spending some time working on herself following her split from second husband Karl Cook in the summer of 2021. Kaley and Tom fell hard and fast — less than two weeks after meeting, they made their Instagram debut as a couple. A few months later, they announced they were expected a baby.
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In a January 2021 blog post, actress and blogger Eva Amurri opened up about how she met and fell for chef Ian Hock — whom she described as a “unicorn” because he embraced the fact that she has three young children and was recently divorced from soccer analyst Kyle Martino when they started seeing each other. They met at Ian’s restaurant while she was dining with a friend who went to high school with him in New York City. Eva and the chef had “an immediate connection and spark,” she wrote, adding that she “thought he was cute and easy to talk to.” They followed each other on Instagram and “created a really special friendship” while discovering how much they have in common. After about a month of chatting online, they finally went on their first date. “I felt SO close to him, and so safe with him, and it was an old-fashioned courtship in a lot of ways,” Eva wrote. “I’ll be honest, whenever I had dated in the past, things had gotten physical pretty quickly (if not immediately) and so this style was completely new for me. And PERFECT. I highly recommend it. We went at my pace, and I truly believe that to this day, we have an extremely deep connection because of it.” Ian proposed in 2023.
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Carrie Underwood has one of her band members to thank for her marriage to former professional hockey player Mike Fisher. The retired NHL star was hoping for an introduction to the country music singer at the Grand Ole Opry and asked a friend who knew her bass player, Mark Childers, for help. But Mark was protective and declined. “[Mike] wanted to meet Carrie [backstage] at the Opry and I didn’t allow it,” Mark said on “The Howard Stern Show” in May 2023, noting that the athlete “kept trying.” A year later, Mike finally came face-to-face with Carrie at a meet and greet in his native Canada in October 2008. “We talked on the phone for a few months before we went out on our first date,” Carrie told Howard, explaining that the slow burn “was good — it kind of laid some foundation.”
Their first date finally came in December 2008. “It was New Year’s Eve and there was a team party and I actually invited myself,” Carrie said, explaining that Mike “moved very slow. I was like, ‘You know, New Year’s Eve is coming up. Are you doing anything?’ He’s like, ‘There’s a team party.’ I said, ‘Do you need a date?'” They shared their first kiss that night and married in 2010.
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Actress-singer Vanessa Hudgens and professional baseball player Cole Tucker went public with their romance in late 2020. Months later, the “High School Musical” alum revealed the “very random” way she met the Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop and outfielder. “Me and Cole met on a Zoom meditation group,” she told “Entertainment Tonight” in April 2021. “Very random … Zoom, you’ve got to love it.” A few weeks later during an appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” Vanessa shared what happened next. “I get on the Zoom, and I’m like, ‘Who is that?’ I found him, and we started talking,” she said, explaining that she made that happen by making the first move herself. “I think I still have that stigma that the man is supposed to do that initial step. If I want something or someone, I’m going after them,” the “High School Musical” alum said. “I fully just slid into his DMs and was like, ‘Hey, it was nice to meet you.’ So I think there is no shame in making the first move. Why wait for someone else to give you what you want?”
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Country music star Billy Ray Cyrus proposed to Firerose in August 2022 following his divorce from wife Tish Cyrus, but he actually met the Australian singer-songwriter 12 years earlier. The “Achy Breaky Heart” and “Old Town Road” hitmaker shared the story with People magazine, explaining that he saw his future fiancée — who’s several decades his junior — for the first time when he took his dog, Tex, outside while working on the Disney Channel series “Hannah Montana” with daughter Miley Cyrus. “There’s a couple old pine trees on the [studio] lot that look like Tennessee. Tex and I would go out there in the middle of the day and he’d take care of his business and we’d stretch and I’d think how much I missed Tennessee. On that given day, Firerose came out of the front door. There was almost a moment of, I don’t know, recognition. I was like, ‘This girl’s a star,'” Billy Ray explained.
Firerose — who was at the lot for an audition she didn’t get and doesn’t remember now — walked over to see his dog and they started chatting. Billy Ray offered to introduce her to some people who worked on “Hannah Montana” and let her watch the cast rehearse, thinking “it might lead to a role or just another contact at Disney. And so, off me and her and Tex went back to the studio and I think she met a lot of the cast and met the producers, writers. And, in some ways, well, in a lot of ways, we became friends.” They stayed in touch through the years and during the pandemic became songwriting partners and — as his marriage to Tish ended for good — far more.
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Millie Bobby Brown started dating Jake Bongiovi — the son of rock star Jon Bon Jovi — in 2021 when they were in their late teens. “We met on Instagram,” the “Stranger Things” and “Enola Holmes” actress revealed in a Wired Autocomplete Interview in November 2022, explaining, “we were friends for a bit, and then, what can I say?”
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“Dallas” star Patrick Duffy had been widowed for three years — his wife of more than four decades, ballet dancer Carlyn Rosser, succumbed to cancer in 2017 — when he unexpectedly fell for “Happy Days” actress Linda Purl. They’d met years earlier but lost touch and ended up on the same group text during the coronavirus pandemic. “I was married for almost 45 years, I wasn’t looking for it. I didn’t feel I needed it. And then fate just [stepped in] and changed the perspective,” Patrick told “Extra” in 2020. “We started texting and then FaceTiming and then Zooming — we did a two-to-three-hour Zoom every single night. At the end of … two and a half months, we were both feeling a lot different than just casual friendship. So I packed up my car, I drove 20 hours, I was on her doorstep, I asked permission if I could kiss her — and we’ve been together ever since.”
In a January 2022 joint appearance on Britain’s “This Morning,” Linda acknowledged, “I don’t think it would have happened otherwise because in our normal lives pre-pandemic we wouldn’t have had three hours to Zoom, but we did.” Added Patrick, “I wasn’t looking for [love], but it found me.” Later that year, Patrick gushed to People magazine about how he and Linda — who was previously married four times, including to Desi Arnaz Jr. — “seamlessly” work as a team. “Our lifestyles make us very compatible in almost every conceivable way. In the kitchen, the way we cook, the way we clean, the way we function together as individuals,” he said. “I’m really proud of both of us in the fact that nothing gets in the way of our relationship or our ability to function in the world because we are in fact in love with each other.”
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Pop star Katy Perry and actor Orlando Bloom — who popped the question with a flower-shaped engagement ring on Valentine’s Day in 2019 — were brought together by an In-N-Out burger. Katy shared the story of their meet-cute on the Feb. 25, 2019, episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” “In-N-Out plays a big role in my life. We bonded over an In-N-Out burger about three years [ago] at the [2016] Golden Globes,” Katy explained. (They’re pictured on that fateful night.) “He stole one off of my table — I was sitting with Denzel Washington. He took it and I was like, ‘Wait! Who — oh, you’re so hot. Fine, take it.’ And then I saw him at a party [later that night] and I was like, ‘How are those onions resting on your molars?’ He’s like, ‘I like you.’ And then, you know, cut to…” Katy said, holding up her engagement ring. In 2020, they welcomed their first child together, daughter Daisy Dove.
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In November 2021, music star Adele opened up about how she got together with boyfriend Rich Paul, a sports agent who works with some of the biggest names in the NBA, in 2021 in the wake of her divorce from Simon Konecki. “I met him at a birthday party, we were on the dance floor,” she told Oprah Winfrey on the CBS special “Adele One Night Only.” “And then we met a couple years later. We went out for dinner, which he says was a business meeting, and I’m like, ‘A business meeting about what?’ And then it was the first time we hung out on our own. Without friends. And I think that was a natural way that people would meet each other in real life.”
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Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly (real name: Colson Baker) — who got engaged in January 2022 — have let people think they met while filming the 2021 movie “Midnight in the Switchgrass” in 2020, but they actually met a few years earlier at a GQ party in Los Angeles, they told the magazine in 2021. (She was still married to actor Brian Austin Green at the time.) “This weird thing happened. We didn’t see each other,” she said, asking MGK, “Do you remember [seeing] my face?” to which he replied, “That’s what’s crazy. I don’t. I don’t remember your face.” She doesn’t remember seeing his either. “I just remember this tall, blonde, ghostly creature and I looked up and I was like, ‘You smell like weed.’ He looked down at me and he was like, ‘I am weed.’ Then, I swear to God, he disappeared like a ninja in a smoke bomb.” When they reunited on the set of their movie, sparks flew, and they soon became a couple as she moved on from her marriage. The musician-actor told GQ that for their first real date, he picked Megan up in a 1974 Cadillac convertible. They listened to Ella Fitzgerald songs and he drove her to the edge of a canyon where his friend had set the mood, prepping the spot with roses and a picnic. They then drove down Sunset Boulevard to the Roxy Theatre, a music venue. But it was closed, so “we went to the roof and played pop punk [music] and made out,” MGK told GQ.
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When actor Kal Penn publicly came out as a gay man in an interview with People magazine that hit the internet on Oct. 31, 2021, to promote his new book “You Can’t Be Serious,” he revealed his engagement to his boyfriend of 11 years at the time, Josh. In his book, the “Harold and Kumar” franchise star detailed their first date, which took place when the “House” and “Designated Survivor” actor was taking a hiatus from Hollywood to work in then-President Barack Obama’s administration in Washington, D.C. Kal explained that he was shocked when Josh arrived at his apartment with an 18-pack of Coors Light and switched the TV to watch NASCAR. “I thought, ‘This obviously is not going to work out. I have one day off from the White House and this dude is unironically watching cars go around and make left turns?” He was shocked when it worked out, adding, “Next thing you know, it’s been a couple months and we’re watching NASCAR every Sunday. I’m like, ‘What is happening?'”
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Oscar winner Taika Waititi and his wife since 2022, pop singer Rita Ora, have a “Twilight” star to thank for introducing them. “We’ve actually known each other for years, before we got together [romantically in 2021],” the Marvel filmmaker, writer and actor said on the BBC Two series “Louis Theroux Interviews” in November 2022. “Everyone thinks we met in Australia last year” — after they were photographed looking cozy. But the truth is that they met years earlier. “You know who brought her to my house? Rob Pattinson. He brought her over,” Taika explained, as reported by DailyMail.com. “I was having a little BBQ and we just got chatting, we hit it off, became friends. Then for the next three and a half years we were just good mates.” The “Thor: Ragnarok” and “Jojo Rabbit” writer-director added, “We were in different relationships, and every time we hung out, we would just catch up where we left off, and it was a good friendship, and we decided to ruin it all.”
Taika said he likes “the fact that we work hard, and we’ve both got our own jobs and [are] independent, but are also best friends.” He acknowledged that though they’re from “different parts of the world — she’s from Kosovo and I’m from New Zealand,” they have similar backgrounds. “We both grew up poor in working-class families, her dad owned pubs and she hung out in pubs a lot when she was a kid and my mum worked in pubs and a lot of my family enjoy being in pubs so I was in pubs a lot as a kid,” he shared, adding, “The background of the Maori communities are quite similar to the Kosovan communities, like our sensibilities are quite aligned, I think.”
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“Top Gun: Maverick” star Miles Teller and his wife, model Keleigh Sperry, met at a party for the Grammy-winning band the Black Keys in 2013. “We both had mutual friends of the band,” Miles told Vogue. “Keleigh had caught my eye early in the night, and we talked. I didn’t think it went well, but after a few more attempts, I got her to dance with me, and a week later, we went on a date. After we met, I knew she was the one.” Added Keleigh, “He was so charming and charismatic. I adored him from the first moment we met.” After four years of dating, he proposed while on safari in South Africa and they wed in 2019.
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Michael Caine and Shakira Baksh have been happily married since 1973. Their epic love story started one night in 1971 when the English acting legend was watching TV at home with a buddy. A Maxwell House coffee advertisement set in Brazil came on — and Shakira, a model, was in it. “I saw this lady on the television in a commercial and fell in love instantly,” Michael confessed on “The Jonathan Ross Show” in 2018. “I thought, ‘That’s the woman for me,’ and I said to my mate, ‘We’re going to Brazil in the morning. We’re going to find her.'”
The same night, they went to their local disco (it was the ’70s, after all) where a mutual friend who worked in advertising joined them. When Michael mentioned the woman and his travel plans, the guy blew Michael’s mind: “We make that commercial,” he told the actor, who also shared the story on Andrew Denton’s “Interview” show in Australia in 2019. The guy then informed Michael that Shakira wasn’t Brazilian but of Indian descent (she was born in British Guiana) and told him, “She’s not in Brazil, she’s in Fulham Road,” which was barely a mile from Michael’s place.
He got Shakira’s number and “I phoned her 11 times, 10 of which she wouldn’t go out with me,” he said. “The last one she decided to go out with me… We went out and fell in love instantly and have never parted since.”
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Nicolas Cage fell for the woman who became his fifth wife while he was visiting her native country sometime in 2019. “We met in Japan and I thought she was stunning when I met her. We had a lot in common,” Nic told “ET” in July 2021. “She likes animals too, so I asked her, ‘Do you have any pets?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I have flying squirrels.’ She had two sugar gliders… I thought, ‘That’s it. This could work out.'” He proposed in 2020 in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. “She left New York [where she was visiting me] and went back to [her hometown of] Kyoto, Japan, and I went back to Nevada and I haven’t seen her for six months [due to pandemic restrictions],” he explained on brother Marc “The Cope” Coppola’s Q104.3 radio show in August 2020. “We were really happy together … so I finally just said, ‘Look, I wanna marry you,’ and we got engaged on FaceTime. And I got her a black diamond engagement ring — ’cause her favorite color is black, she wanted the black gold and the black diamond, so I found it and customized it and personalized it. I actually sent it to her via FedEx.” The couple wed in Las Vegas in February 2021.
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Alexandra Daddario is an actress known for her work in projects like “The White Lotus,” the “Percy Jackson” franchise and the “Baywatch” movie. Andrew Form is a producer known for his work on projects like “A Quiet Place,” “The Purge” and “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” (as well as his first marriage to actress Jordana Brewster). But Alexandra and Andrew didn’t connect through Hollywood — in fact, they met like many people: on the street. It happened during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic when he was in New York City on a layover, waiting for a connecting flight to Europe. “I was waiting for my co-op to approve me so I was sleeping on an acquaintance’s couch and would take frequent walks,” Alexandra told Vogue. “He was also on a walk, and we passed each other downtown. He turned back and said ‘hi’ just as I was turning around to glance back at him. I laughed and said ‘hi,’ and then we both laughed about how we were the only two people on what is normally an incredibly busy street, and he asked if he could take me to dinner.”
He had to catch his flight the following morning but said he’d be back in town in a few weeks. “I said ‘OK’ [to having dinner] against my better judgment,” Alexandra joked. “Nowadays, you’re supposed to meet people on dating apps!” Upon his return to NYC, they met for that first date at the Greenwich Hotel, where Andrew was staying. “It was peak COVID and because he was a guest — one of three in the whole hotel — we had our first date by the fire in their downstairs living room,” Alexandra recalled. “I brought my dog, and she wandered into the kitchen at one point, and we didn’t notice. Someone came out holding her and said, ‘Is this your dog?'” They got engaged in 2021 and married in New Orleans in June 2022.
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“The Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Teresa Giudice met the man she’s described as her “soulmate” while she was visiting the Jersey Shore, she revealed in a February 2021 interview with “Extra.” “I was walking and that’s how I met him, exercising,” she told host Billy Bush of how things started between her and Luis Ruelas, whom she started seeing in the fall of 2020 nearly a year after her split from husband Joe Giudice. “He ran past me with no shirt on, and I was like, ‘Oh, who is that?’ … He ran past me that week a few times. One morning he was packing his car to leave to go back home and that’s how we met.”
After they finally got to talking, Luis handed over his business cards to Teresa and her married girlfriend. He then drove off — but soon circled back. “He said, ‘Teresa, my son wanted to know why I didn’t ask for your number.’ I said, ‘I have your business card, I will text you.’ My girlfriend took my phone and was like, ‘I’m texting him right now.'” Teresa said they ended up talking “for hours” later that night. The couple got engaged in 2021 and married in 2022.
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Kim Kardashian told host Amanda Hirsch on her “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast that she’d met Pete Davidson before — in 2019, Kim, third husband Kanye West, Timothee Chalamet and Pete all attended Kid Cudi’s birthday dinner — and they almost exchanged numbers at the Met Gala in September 2021 when they briefly chatted about her upcoming October 2021 hosting gig on Pete’s show, “Saturday Night Live.” But things turned awkward. “He was like, ‘Take my number if you need anything.’ And I had gloves on [that were attached to my Balenciaga ensemble] and I couldn’t get in my phone with the gloves, and I was like, ‘Oh I have gloves! And I can’t — and he was like, ‘All right, cool,’ and walked away,” she remembered.
A month later, they saw each other again at a dress rehearsal for an “SNL” sketch where he played Aladdin and she was Princess Jasmine. When they kissed in the sketch, “it was just a vibe,” Kim said on the June 1 episode of “The Kardashians.” “And I was like … maybe I just need to try something different. But Pete does not come to my afterparty. Everyone was at my afterparty. He does not give me the time of day.” She kept thinking about it, and “a few days later,” she explained, “I called the producer at ‘SNL’ and I was like, ‘Hey, do you have Pete’s number?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah.’ And I text him. I wasn’t even thinking like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to be in a relationship with him.’ I was just thinking like, heard about this BDE, need to get out there, like, I need to just like, jump-start my… I was just basically DTF,” she confessed.
Later that month, they were spotted riding roller coasters together at a theme park and soon, things got serious. “Pete has got to be literally the best human being I’ve ever met. Like, [he has] the best heart,” Kim said. “People always say like, ‘Oh he’s so funny and it has to do with how funny he is. That’s like, fourth on my list of why I like him.” Kim and Pete split in August 2022 after nine months of dating.
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Country superstars Faith Hill and Tim McGraw met back in the mid-’90s at the Country Radio Seminar’s New Faces show, where both were on the bill. They were with other people at the time, and, according to Taste of Country, Tim’s then-girlfriend told him that she wasn’t sure he should speak to Faith again. That’s because the attraction “was immediate,” Tim told “The Bobby Bones Show” in 2016. Nothing happened right away, but he eventually went over to Faith’s house unannounced with an unusual gift in tow: a bowl of chicken and dumplings. “He had the bowl covered in aluminum foil, and he had a spoon and a fork on top of the bowl,” Faith said on the same radio show. “He said, ‘I didn’t know if you like to eat your dumpling with a spoon or a fork.'” Her reaction? “I was like, ‘Bam!'” she said. She opened for Tim on his 1996 tour — and they fell in love, got pregnant and got married the same year.
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“One Tree Hill” alum Jana Kramer met Navy SEAL-turned-private equity portfolio manager Ian Schinelli, at a child’s birthday party in October 2021 — six months after ending her nearly six-year marriage to Mike Caussin in the wake of another cheating scandal. “[Ian] is friends with Andrew East, [my friend, Olympic gymnast] Shawn Johnson’s husband … they work out together,” Jana explained on her Jan. 17, 2022, “Whine Down” podcast. Andrew introduced the pair during his daughter’s party (Jana has two kids with ex Mike and Ian has a young daughter from a previous relationship). “I wasn’t supposed to be there and [Ian] didn’t have his daughter that weekend but his ex let him have [her] for the party,” Jana explained of how the stars aligned. “So I go to the party and I see this guy in an orange shirt and I was like, ‘Oh man, he is cute, but obviously he’s probably married,’ and I don’t pay much attention to it. But long story short, Andrew came over to me and was like, ‘Hey, there’s a guy here I want you to meet,’ and I’m like, ‘We’re at a 2-year-old kid’s party, what are you doing, please don’t try to set me up right now,’ and he’s like, ‘Seriously, he’s a really good dude, a Navy SEAL, he’s the guy in the orange shirt.'” Jana couldn’t believe it. “I was like, ‘Shut up! I’ve been staring at him like this entire time!’ And that’s how we met and then we just talked and yeah, kind of the rest is history.” They split six months later.
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During a 2017 appearance on “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” Jason Momoa revealed when he fell for wife Lisa Bonet, how they met and what they did on their first date. “Listen, it was more than [love at first sight]. Ever since I was like 8 years old and I saw her on the TV, I was like, ‘Mommy, I want that one,'” he said. “I was like, ‘I’m going to stalk you for the rest of my life, and I’m going to get you.’ I’m a full-fledged stalker… I didn’t tell her that… She was a queen, always.” Fast-forward a few decades and the “Game of Thrones” alum finally met the “Cosby Show” star at a jazz club in 2005 — “right place, right time” Jason said. When she introduced herself, Jason turned to a buddy and started squealing. “I had f****** fireworks going off inside, man,” he recalled. He was living in a hotel and didn’t have a car at the time and “convinced her to take me home,” he added. They ended up at Cafe 101. “She ordered a Guinness and that was it. I beyond love Guinness… Then I ordered grits. And the rest is history,” he said. They had two kids together and married in 2017. In 2022, they announced their split.
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Zoe Kravitz met “Love” star Karl Glusman at a bar during a night out with mutual friends in 2016, Rolling Stone revealed in a November 2018 cover story on the actress. Karl had long had a thing for the “High Fidelity” star but was too nervous to talk to her. Lucky for him, Zoe saw something in him too that night: She pretended to be on her phone outside the bar so that she could invite Karl back to her place for an afterparty as he left — and they ended up making out. “It was cute!” the “Big Little Lies” actress told Rolling Stone. Karl moved in not long after that and they got engaged in February 2018 and married the following year. But it wasn’t meant to last and Zoe filed for divorce in December 2020.
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A few days after “Twilight” franchise star Taylor Lautner proposed to his love of three years, nurse Taylor Dome, in November 2021 (they wed a year later), the actor’s sister, Makena Moore, took to Instagram to reveal how the couple met: She introduced them after meeting her future sister-in-law at church! “Not to toot my own horn or anything, but i’m feeling tooty 😉 think I picked out a good one for my brother,” she shared. “@taydome the moment I met you at a little church in Nashville, I knew that I had to introduce you to my brother. You two couldn’t be more perfect for each other. The way that you guys compliment each other genuinely blows me away. I CANNOT believe that I gain a sister and best friend for life. Cheers to the happy couple.” Her big brother replied in the comments, “YOU DID GOOD KID.”
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Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth met musician Josh Bryant in 2016 when his band, country-rock group Backroad Anthem, performed at her niece’s wedding. They connected again when the band played at her nephew’s wedding in 2018 and started dating that August, Vogue reported. After three years of dating, Josh proposed in October 2021.
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Former “The Real Housewives of Orange County” star Meghan King revealed in a wedding-day interview with Brides magazine in October 2021 how she met second husband Cuffe Biden Owens, a Los Angeles-based attorney who’s the nephew of President Joe Biden. (The couple, top left and right, is pictured here with Meghan’s siblings RJ and Julie). “We connected on a dating app, texted for a day or two, then spent five straight hours on the phone the first time we spoke,” Meghan revealed of the start to their whirlwind romance, which — according to Us Weekly — saw them marrying just three weeks later. “By the time that call ended, Cuffe was booked and packed for a flight to St. Louis [where I live] that took off in about eight hours. Within a week, we were back on the East Coast, meeting his family, and starting to plan our future together. We didn’t leave each other’s side for weeks.” The pair wed on Oct. 11, 2021, at Cuffe’s childhood home in Pennsylvania and split in December the same year.
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Supermodel Gisele Bundchen and NFL quarterback Tom Brady met after being set up by a mutual friend in 2006. Tom had just ended a long romance with Bridget Moynahan — who was newly pregnant with their son Jack at the time — and Gisele had split from Leonardo DiCaprio a year earlier. “This friend told me he knew a girl version of me,” Tom told Details in 2009. Gisele added, “And he said to me he’d found a boy version of me.” In a September 2021 interview with WSJ Magazine, Tom further revealed that the supermodel sent him to voicemail the first time he called her about getting together. “I think the one phone call that changed my life was my friend Ed, who called me one day and he said, ‘I have this girl and I think you should call her,'” recalled the football star. “I ended up calling her and it ended up being the love of my life. … She didn’t pick up, actually. I had to leave a voicemail.” In 2015, Gisele told British Vogue that it was love at first sight when she finally met Tom. “I knew Tom was the one straightaway,” she said. “I could see it in his eyes that he was a man with integrity who believes in the same things I do.” They’ve been married since 2009.
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James Middleton — a businessman who founded the Ella & Co. dog food and Boomf personalized marshmallow brands who happens to be the brother of Britain’s Duchess Kate — has one of his dogs to thank for introducing him to the woman who, in September 2021, became his wife. In 2018, James brought Ella, his cocker spaniel who’s also a registered therapy dog, with him to the South Kensington Club in London’s Chelsea area, where both he and French financial analyst Alizée Thevenet were having meetings. “Ella was lying at my feet under the table; realizing she might want some water, I trusted her to take herself over to the water bowl across the terrace. However, she made a beeline for Alizee,” James told The Telegraph in 2021 while speaking about dog training. “Rather embarrassed, I went over to apologize and bring Ella back. But Alizee thought I was the waiter and ordered her drink while continuing to stroke Ella, who at this point was on her back lapping up the attention.” He continued, “Little did I know, but I had just met my future wife, all thanks to Ella. If I hadn’t trusted Ella, I wouldn’t have brought her to the South Kensington Club and she wouldn’t have been able to say hi to the woman who became my fiancée. I do believe it was the early stages of training Ella and building our trust and relationship that reaped this unexpected reward.”
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Tampa Bay Buccaneers tight end Rob Gronkowski’s long romance with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue model Camille Kostek was sparked at a charity event. “It was November 2013 and we were at a Goodwill event. It was right before Thanksgiving. So we were filling turkey baskets for families who are less fortunate,” Camille recalled in an interview on SiriusXM’s “This is Happening with Mark Zito and Ryan Sampson” that aired in February 2021, as reported by Fox News. He played for the New England Patriots then, and she was a new cheerleader for the team. “He ripped off his ‘Hi, my name is Rob Gronkowski’ sticker on his shirt … he had written on the back of it his phone number and then he wrote ‘Shhh,’ because he knew it was … a secret.” Retired tight end Jermaine Wiggins passed her the name tag. “I was a rookie [cheerleader] and I was so scared. I was like, ‘Oh no, no, no, I can’t take this. I can’t take his number.’ And then [Jermaine] was like, ‘Just take it,’ and I was like, ‘OK,’ and I put it in my pocket,” she recalled. “I didn’t make it locker room talk. I never spoke about it.” Several days later, she FaceTimed Gronk “and I put my phone down and I like, looked away from it. And then he answered it and he didn’t look either. I was like, ‘Hello.’ He was like, ‘Who is this? You called me.’ And I was like, ‘Um, who’s this?’ I could tell it was his voice and he like, peeked his head over.” Camille added, “He had just gotten back from a Texans game so he had like, a suit on and everything. And he was like, ‘Hello?’ And I was like, ‘It’s Camille.’ And he was beaming. ‘He was like, Oh my God, I never thought you’d call me.'” The rest is history!
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Denzel Washington first laid eyes on wife Pauletta on the set of “the first movie I ever did,” a TV movie about Olympic runner Wilma Rudolph (he played Wilma’s future husband and Pauletta was one of the track stars), he shared on “Live With Kelly and Ryan” in 2018. “I met her then but I didn’t meet her then — I saw her then. About a year later, there was a party and she was there, and at that party I had talked about going to see a play. I went to see the play and at intermission, the lights came up and she was sitting [there]. She said she just happened to go see it.” They started dating and, as he once told “Access Hollywood,” she turned down his first two proposals but accepted his third. Denzel and Pauletta married in 1983 and went on to welcome four kids.
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Former “The Real Housewives of New York City” star Bethenny Frankel started dating producer and real estate developer Paul Bernon — to whom she got engaged in early 2021 — in 2018. How did they hook up? “We met on a dating app,” she told People magazine in April 2021. “I was pretty lucky when I walked in and saw him. He had a twinkle. He came as advertised — better than advertised. He overshot the mark.”
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On Dec. 31, 2020, “Queer Eye” star Jonathan Van Ness revealed on Instagram that he’d quietly married Mark Peacock earlier in the year. A few days later, the hairstylist and grooming expert shared the story of how they fell in love. “We went on a date in London, which turned into more dates whilst I was on comedy tour,” JVN wrote alongside an Instagram slideshow documenting their romance, which appears to have sparked in October 2019 while he was performing in Britain. “At the end of that time I was taking my mom, aunt & friends on a mini break to Amsterdam. I wanted @marklondon to come with but, was it a bit intense to ask Mark to come after a couple weeks’ worth of dates to come meet my mom & and friends on a mini break? Maybe so, but something about Mark felt different and I’m quite sure he felt the same 🥰 .” Soon, Mark moved from London to the States, “learn[ed] to drive on the left, got married to my soulmate and one true love @jvn and adopted a little Jack Russell called Pablo and entered a family with 4 amazing cats,” he wrote on his own Instagram slideshow of memories.
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Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor started their romance after the “Two and a Half Men” alum — who’s 32 years older than the “American Horror Story” franchise star — slid into Sarah’s DMs! “It’s a long story. We met a very, very long time ago. I was with someone else,” Sarah explained on “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen” in January 2019. They eventually reconnected while working on a project at another star’s place. “We were doing a thing at Martha Plimpton’s house. It was for an organization that she was working with and we were both doing a little PSA for it,” Sarah explained. “We sort of breezed by each other and started following each other on Twitter.” Some direct messages followed, and that was it. The couple’s romance was made public in late 2015.
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Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis met in 2011 at a “Saturday Night Live” afterparty but didn’t go out till months later. “I was just learning to be myself. I’d been divorced nine months,” she told Marie Claire in 2013. “We were both seeing people but were single. He seemed to really see me, see through the bulls***. He said very few words and couldn’t keep eye contact. He was so handsome, and he could dance.” But the comedy star didn’t make a move — so Olivia finally did. “Over the next six months we kept running into each other. [One night], my best guy friend walked up to him and said, ‘This is Olivia’s number. Use it,'” she told Allure in 2013. “That was the beginning.” But Jason still took his sweet time. “He literally didn’t kiss me until the fourth date,” Olivia told radio host Howard Stern in 2016. “He finally kissed me and I was completely head over heels.” Jason later explained to “All Access” why he waited to plant one on her. “I just had a hunch that the second I kissed her, I wasn’t gonna end up ever kissing anyone again, so I had to be careful with it,” he said. The couple got engaged in 2012, welcomed two kids and split in 2020.
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Music and TikTok star Jason Derulo and model Jena Frumes met in a pretty typical place — the gym — right before coronavirus lockdowns began in early 2020. “We met at Equinox,” the “Savage Love” singer told Page Six in 2021 several months after they started seeing each other. “We both have a similar desire to work out all the time, and I had seen her once there before, and then the second time, I was like, ‘Aight. Imma go talk to her,’ and the rest is history.” Four months after welcoming son together in May 2021, Jason and Jena announced they’d split.
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A lot of people think Adam Brody met Leighton Meester on the set of their 2011 film “The Oranges.” But it turns out they connected long before that — though it was hardly romantic. On a March 2021 episode of Anna Faris’s “Unqualified” podcast, as reported by Just Jared, Adam explained that he and Leighton met by chance at famed Los Angeles eatery Canter’s Deli around 2006 — just before his hit show “The O.C.” came to an end and Leighton’s big series “Gossip Girl” debuted. “Josh Schwartz produced both shows and literally the first time we met, that whole cast was eating at Canter’s and I lived at Canter’s for like, my entire 20s. And I was leaving, and he introduced all of us,” Adam explained. He and Leighton then “bumped into” each other a few times over the next few years before both were cast in “The Oranges.” “We did this movie together. I was seeing someone at the time… So we met kind of through mutual work friends off and on. And then we didn’t get together [until] about a year after that movie, when I was single,” he said. Still, Adam admitted, “I was very attracted to her from the jump. She’s a heavenly creature. I thought she was gorgeous. And even when we did the movie, there was chemistry there, but I was seeing someone.” When he became single again, he wasn’t sure what to do. “I had no idea whether [Leighton] was a good person or not. And, in fact, kind of assumed she probably wasn’t for like the first handful of years that I didn’t know her, just because, I don’t know, ‘Gossip Girl.'” He soon realized he was wrong. “I was like, ‘Oh, she’s cool.’ But I still didn’t know, and that continued even to when we first started dating… And come to find out she’s literally like Joan of Arc,” Adam said. “She is the strongest, best person I know. She is my moral compass and North Star, and I just can’t say enough good things about her character. It’s crazy.” They married in 2014 and now have two kids.
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Chrissy Teigen was a 21-year-old catalog model when she was hired to star in the 2007 music video for John Legend’s hit “Stereo.” “I walked into John’s dressing room to meet him, and he was ironing in his underwear,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2014. “I said, ‘You do your own ironing?!’ He said, ‘Of course I do.’ I gave him a hug.” They talked during the 14-hour shoot — in which they danced together, her in lingerie — and had In-N-Out burgers late-night at his hotel. “I’m not going to lie. We hooked up,” she admitted. But she didn’t try to get him to commit. He went on tour, and though they talked while he was away, “I let him be himself for a while. The worst thing you can do is try to lock someone like that down early on, then have them think, ‘There’s so much more out there.’ I played it cool for a long time. Never once did I ask, ‘What are we?’ Marriage was never my goal, because I’ve never been very traditional. I was just happy to be with him.” Nevertheless, the pair married in 2013 and now have two kids.
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In the summer of 2006, Matthew McConaughey met the woman who would become the mother of his children — Brazilian model and Muxo handbag designer Camila Alves — when he went to a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard with pal Lance Armstrong. “And I’m not a club guy but this night I was a club guy, right? … Single men having a good time. We had a great day at the beach. It was the summer,” he recalled to People magazine. “I was making margaritas at the table and out of the corner of my eye, this sort of aqua-green figure went floating across the frame about 20 feet in front of me. My eye went up and I remember what came out of my mouth. I didn’t say ‘Who is that?’ I went, ‘What is that?’ As l was trying to get that’s attention across the room, I went in my head, ‘This is not the kind of woman you call over across the room, McConaughey. Get your a** out of your chair and go get her.’ Which I did.” Camila later told “Access Hollywood” that she didn’t initially recognize him. “The first interaction, I did not know who he was,” she said. “At the time he had a really long beard, and he had this rasta hat. He was all covered up, and I didn’t really realize who he was.” He spoke to her in Spanish and Portuguese and invited her friends to sit with his friends. They went on their first date three nights later, started having kids in 2008 and married in 2012.
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Dancer-actress Jenna Dewan fell for Tony- and Grammy-winning Broadway actor-musician Steve Kazee in 2018 — but it turns out that she actually met him years earlier when she was happily married to Channing Tatum. “I had met Steve years ago in a flash, it must’ve been five minutes,” she told People magazine in October 2019, shortly after revealing that she and Steve were expecting a baby. “I saw him perform in ‘Once’ on Broadway and I was just totally blown away by his talent. My mom was with me, and we got to go backstage and meet the actors. He just had a cool [energy] about him.” And that was that. “Obviously I was married and so we never spoke or saw each other again for six years, but I never forgot the moment. And then six years later, obviously it becomes public knowledge that [Channing and I had] separated and [Steve] contacted me” months later, just as Jenna was, as she puts it, coming “out of my grief tunnel.” It started with a phone call that lasted for hours and “it was an instant connection when we met each other,” Jenna told People. “There was no way we could avoid it. So in my eyes it was truly, completely meant to be. There was like a lightning bolt behind it.” Jenna and Steve welcomed a son in 2020.
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Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra got engaged in July 2018 after less than two months of dating and married in December the same year. But the seeds of their romance were sown much earlier. After gushing about Priyanka’s beauty and talent to a mutual friend — her “Quantico” co-star Graham Rogers — the pop star sent her a DM on Twitter in September 2016. Priyanka hit Nick back and asked him to text her instead. They finally met in person several months later at the 2017 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. More text flirting followed, and they met for a drink a week ahead of the 2017 Met Gala, where both attended as guests of designer Ralph Lauren… but they were so busy, it still took another year for them to actually go on a proper date. They finally made it happen on May 25, 2018. Nick shared details on Instagram a year later. “One year ago today I went to go see Beauty and the Beast at the Hollywood bowl with a group of friends. One of those friends was the woman that would become my best friend, my confidant, my muse, my beautiful wife,” he wrote. In January 2022, they became first-time parents when they welcomed a child via surrogate.
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Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine married former Victoria’s Secret Angel Behati Prinsloo in 2014. They’ve since welcomed two daughters: Dusty Rose and Gio Grace. As for how these two lovebirds met? Through a mutual friend! “Adam was looking for a girl for a music video that could do some action stuff, and our friend was like, ‘You should meet Behati because she’s a total tomboy and down for anything,’ so he emailed me asking if I could do it,” she told Porter Magazine. “I ended up not doing it, but we kept emailing each other. It was such a natural correspondence that we kind of fell in love over email.” A month later, the Namibian beauty flew to Los Angeles for work and met Adam for the first time. “Then he took me for dinner and we talked for hours and had the best time,” she continued. “It was love at first sight, it was crazy. We broke up for two months, realized that it was the worst decision, then got back together, got engaged and got married. It was a wild ride!”
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Actress Lily Collins met filmmaker Charlie McDowell while working on the true-crime drama “Gilded Rage” in 2019. Lily acted in the movie while Charlie co-wrote and directed it. During an interview with The Mirror, the “Emily in Paris” actress chatted about their romance and how she knew early on that he was her person. “It was one of those situations where I knew the second I met him that I wanted to be his wife one day. So it was just a matter of when, really,” she said of their first meeting. In September 2020, Charlie proposed to the Golden Globe-nominated actress while vacationing in Arizona. They married in 2021.
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Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was 35 when he met model Patti Hansen on her 23rd birthday at Studio 54 in 1979. Her close friend, model Shaun Casey, and taken her out but they couldn’t get a bottle of champagne after last call. So Shaun went up to Keith — who was a huge star capable of getting whatever he wanted — and “pointed out this blonde beauty dancing with wild hair flying,” the rocker wrote in his autobiography, Life, as told in Harper’s Bazaar in 2011. Keith got the champagne and Patti thanked him — then she kept dancing. “I didn’t see her again for a while, but the vision stayed in my mind,” Keith wrote in his book. Nine months later, he saw her again at his 36th birthday party — Mick Jagger’s then-partner, model Jerry Hall, had invited her — and that was it. Keith wooed Patti with mix tapes he covered in collages featuring photos of Patti from magazines, Polaroids and messages written in his blood. “That was his method of communication,” Patti told the magazine. “I have everything in boxes. Thousands of those tapes. I’ve saved everything.”
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On an April 2020 episode of SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Show,” Joe Manganiello dished on meeting his wife, Sofia Vergara, at the 2014 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which she attended with her then-fiancé, Nick Loeb. “She was wearing this dress that looked great on her, and I just could not take my eyes off of her,” recalled the actor, adding that he and his brother “just kind of followed her around” during the star-studded event. Later in the evening, Sofia’s “Modern Family” co-star Jesse Tyler Ferguson told the “True Blood” actor that his “friend Sofia” wanted “to come over and say hi” because she was a “big fan” of his work. “I said, ‘Oh, your friend Sofia whose fiancé is also at this party?'” recalled Joe. “I didn’t know what [Jesse] was up to. I was like, ‘Is he gonna get me into a fight in my tuxedo here? What is going on?'” Ultimately, Joe and Sofia met and exchanged “pleasantries.” Just three weeks later, Sofia announced that she and Nick were calling it quits. Joe immediately “hit up Jesse Tyler Ferguson” and said, “I don’t know what kind of emotional state she’s in, but tell her I want to take her out.” Jesse gave Joe’s phone number to Sofia, who was shooting “Hot Pursuit” in New Orleans at the time, and the rest is history! “I said, ‘I’m coming to New Orleans. If you’re not available, I’m just gonna do some sightseeing, but I’m gonna be there and if you’re free I can take you out,'” Joe dished. “She said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘I’ll see you next week.'” Within a year and a half of their first meeting, they’d started dating, gotten engaged and tied the knot.
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“Cobra Kai” star Ralph Macchio became a household name after he played teenaged martial artist Daniel LaRusso in 1984’s “The Karate Kid” at 22. But he was already well-acquainted with the love of his life by that point: He met now-wife Phyllis Fierro, a nurse practitioner, at a cousin’s birthday party in his grandmother’s basement when he was 15. “This is 1970 or whatever, so this is Cheez Doodles, 7Up, Tootsie Rolls, probably the Ruffles with onion dip,” he told People magazine in a 2021 interview. “She was a friend of my cousin, and we just smiled and talked and danced a little. Probably the Hustle!” They married in 1987 and later welcomed two kids.
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Oscar winner Emma Stone met her now-husband, Dave McCary, when she hosted “Saturday Night Live” in December 2016 and he directed her in a hilarious sketch — a fake commercial called “Wells for Boys.” A source told Page Six that Dave returned to the place they met to pop the question in late 2019. “Dave proposed at the offices where they first met at 30 Rock,” NBC’s headquarters in Rockefeller Center in New York City, the source explained. “No one was there and by all accounts, it was very romantic.” The couple quietly married in 2020 and welcomed a daughter in 2021.
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During a joint interview with WSJ Magazine that hit the Internet in July 2020, Miranda Kerr and her husband, Evan Spiegel, dished on how they first met at a 2014 Louis Vuitton event in New York City — and how the supermodel made the first move with the Snapchat co-founder. The duo were seated next to each other at the party, and Miranda started chatting him up. Eventually, they exchanged numbers — but then he abruptly left. When the former Victoria’s Secret Angel still hadn’t heard from Evan after a month passed, she hit him up. “I thought I had no chance [with her], so I wasn’t going to waste my time,” he explained.
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Katie Couric met the man who would become her second husband in 2012. “I was single again and I asked a friend of mine, Molly, whose husband is a trauma surgeon, if her husband knew any other doctors because I thought I’d like to go out with a doctor,” the veteran journalist told People TV’s “The Jess Cagle Interview” in 2018. “And so she thought about it and she said, ‘We don’t really know a doctor, but we do know this banker named John Molner.’ And I said, ‘Does he have a pulse?'” He failed to call so Katie bugged her friend about him and eventually, he phoned her and they set up a date. “He finally asked me out, we met at a restaurant and what can I say? He had me at hello.” Katie married John in 2014.
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During a 2012 appearance on “Conan,” John Krasinski revealed he found Emily Blunt to be “incredibly intimidating” and that he was “scared out of my mind” to ask her out on a date because he just didn’t think he was good enough for her. After she agreed to go out with him, “I decided I’m gonna really hit the gas and bring her to a gun range,” John explained. “I think that I was so sure that I would never end up with her because she’d be like, ‘This is ridiculous, I can have anyone, not you,’ that I was like, ‘I’m going to blow it right away,’ and then that way you don’t feel bad.” He admitted he also “yelped” the first time he fired a gun on the date! In 2018, Emily told People magazine that she was at a restaurant having lunch with a friend when it all kicked off for her. “[My friend and I] were discussing how much I was enjoying being single. And then [my friend] goes, ‘Oh, my God, there’s my friend John.’ And that was it. We were engaged within 10 months, but I think we probably knew before that.” They married in 2010 and now have two daughters.
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In his 2020 memoir “A Very Punchable Face,” Colin Jost revealed that he first met Scarlett Johansson when she hosted “Saturday Night Live” for the first time in 2006 while he was serving as a writer on the sketch-comedy series: “She claims that she remembers thinking I was ‘cute’ but I know what I looked like and that’s not the word I would have used. (‘Shaggy’ would have been more generous. ‘Slovenly’ would have been more accurate),” he wrote. “I remember her being beautiful, smart, sweet and intimidatingly sophisticated,” he continued. “And she had a grace and a smile that I’ve still never seen in any other human.” They finally started dating after Scarlett hosted “SNL” for the fifth time in 2017. Colin and Scarlett married in 2020.
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Elton John met husband David Furnish when he was least expecting it. “In 1993 I went back to my house in Windsor [England] for a while. I wanted meet new people so I rang up a friend in London and said, ‘Could you please rattle some new people together for dinner here Saturday?'” Elton told Parade in 2010. Canada-born David, then an advertising executive on the London board of Ogilvy & Mather, was one of those new people who attended. “I was attracted to David immediately. He was very well-dressed, very shy. The next night we had dinner,” Elton added. “After it, we consummated our relationship. We fell in love very quickly.”
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On “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen” in 2017, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys dished on how they first met and later fell in love on the set of “The Americans.” Said the Welsh actor, “We actually met a very long, long time ago, and I very drunkenly asked her for her number when she was a young, single slip of a thing. So I sort of knew then when I was 26 [circa 2000]. … It was in a parking lot [after a kickball party]. Very romantic. And she asked me to open a beer.” Matthew added that his attraction to Keri was rekindled when they started working together: “It took a while,” he said as she laughed. Keri chimed in, “Basically we did all the readings together and all the things and then after a heavy dose of a fight training, all sweaty at a lunch, he said, ‘You know we’ve met before,’ and I said, ‘No, we haven’t.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, we met before, like 10 years ago.'” Said Matthew to Keri, “I left you a drunken message, and you were like, ‘Oh, I’m shocked that I didn’t call you back.'” Recalled the actress, “As soon as he said that, I knew exactly what he was [talking about], and I said, ‘Of course, I remember that.'” Joked the actor, “‘You were that buffoon that wouldn’t stop calling!'” After ending her marriage to carpenter Shane Deary, Keri and Matthew got together in 2013 and welcomed son Sam in 2016.
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Actor Riz Ahmed revealed on a January 2021 episode of “The Tonight Show” how he met his wife, “A Place for Us” novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza. They encountered each other “so randomly” in a New York City restaurant while he was prepping for his role in the 2020 drama “Sound of Metal,” Riz explained. “We both sat down at the same table in a cafe where we both turned up to write. We were both, like, jostling over the same laptop plug point — like a very modern way of meeting — and we struck up a friendship and then we reconnected down the line.”
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Justin Bieber and wife Hailey Bieber met back in 2009 when she was 13 and he was 15 after her uncle, Alec Baldwin, got her family tickets to see the singer perform on “Today.” “I was never a superfan, of him or of anyone,” the former Hailey Baldwin told Vogue in 2019. “It was never that crazed, screaming thing. I didn’t think about it in any kind of way except for the fact that he was cute. Everybody had a crush on him. But for the first few years we had a weird age gap.” Hailey’s dad, actor Stephen Baldwin, and Justin’s mom, Pattie Mallette — both born-again Christians — became friends after that “Today” show concert. (Hailey later revealed that Stephen invited Pattie and Justin to have dinner with their family and go bowling the next day.) It was years later that Justin and Hailey got close after they saw each other at Hillsong church services in New York City. “One day Justin walked into Hillsong and was like, ‘Hey, you got older.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, what’s up?” Hailey told Vogue. They ended up dating briefly in 2015 and 2016 and rekindled things three years later — this time for good. During a February 2020 appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon,” Hailey revealed what sparked them to reconnect. “Last time I was [on this show], we did this little party trick where I opened a Corona bottle with my teeth,” Hailey explained. “The next morning — after the interview had aired — I got a certain phone call from a certain someone and it was a little like, ‘Hey, how are you? I saw you on ‘Jimmy Fallon’ last night. You were looking really good. I loved that trick that you did, I had no idea that you can do that. It was so cool.’ Cut to, I’m now married to that certain someone.” Hailey officially became Mrs. Bieber when they eloped in September 2018 and they celebrated their love again with a formal religious wedding in September 2019.
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According to Idris Elba, it was “love at first sight” when he met his current wife, model Sabrina Dhowre Elba, while filming 2017’s “The Mountain Between Us” in Vancouver. “I went out on my only day off, true story, it was a Sunday night… went to this party, and there she was,” he recalled on “The View.” “I went to a party called Slow Jam Sunday… and there she was. The rest is history.” The couple tied the knot in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2019.
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Everyone knows that Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis met when they co-starred as teen couple Kelso and Jackie on “That ’70s Show” in the late ’90s. (Ashton was even Mila’s first kiss!) But how did the now-husband and wife actually get together romantically many years later? Mila shared the story with Marc Maron on a 2018 episode of his podcast. Around 2012, she unknowingly saw her old co-star in a new light when they attended an award show. “I was looking around and there was a really beautiful man from the back. I was literally like, ‘Oh, he’s kinda hot.’ … And then he turned around, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s Kutch.’ I thought it was the weirdest thing that I was checking this guy out, and it was someone that I had known forever.” They saw each other at a party, Ashton told Howard Stern in 2017, and a “pretty mutual” attraction developed. “It was kind of obvious that things were happening,” he said. They started hooking up — neither wanted a relationship — and life imitated art. “I did a movie called ‘Friends With Benefits.’ He did a movie that was very similar, ‘No Strings Attached,'” Mila told Marc. “We lived our movies out where we were like, ‘Let’s just hook up. Let’s have fun. We’re both single. We both trust each other. Everything’s great.’ None of us wanted tension. OK, great. We hooked up for three months. And just like our movies, one of us caught feelings.” They got engaged and had their first child in 2014 and got married in 2015.
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During an interview with W magazine that debuted online in February 2019, Dylan Sprouse and Barbara Palvin dished on how they met and fell in love: “He slid into my DMs,” said the Victoria’s Secret model. “She followed me, so I was like, ‘I guess I’ll give her something.’ And I slid into her DMs,” chimed in the former child star. “I was like, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you’re in New York for very long, but we should hang out if you want to. Here’s my number.’ And she didn’t message me for six months.” Explained Barbara, “I took my time. I knew I wasn’t in a good mindset at the time, and maybe deep inside I knew that it could be something more.” Added Dylan, “I’m not one to chase. If I get left on read after putting out my number, f*** that. I’m crying internally, but outwardly… So I ended up booking a movie and going to China for a six-month shoot. My manager was with me and asked, ‘Dylan, is there anything you wish you had wrapped up before you left?’ … And for the first time in six months, Barbara popped in my head, and I thought, I wish I had time to take this girl on a date. Ten minutes later, Barbara texts me for the first time in six months.” She then joined him in China, where she was supposed to have a gig — even though it got canceled.
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Speculation that Chris Pratt was dating Katherine Schwarzenegger kicked off in June 2018 when they were spotted having a picnic together on Father’s Day. Almost a year later, they got married at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, California. (They welcomed their first child in 2020.) So how did they meet? “We met at church!” the Christian actor told “Extra” in July 2019. “There’s a lot of kismet, a lot of connections, but that is where we met.”
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It was love at first sight for these two! “I just saw him from behind. It was 6:30 in the morning, I was on a flight to New York,” Zoe Saldana told USA Today in 2015 of meeting artist husband Marco Perego. “And I can’t even describe to you, it was a vibration. He turned in that moment, because he felt the vibration as well. I know people don’t believe in it; I didn’t believe in it. … It was enough that I felt it. And that was it.” The couple have been married since 2013 and have three kids together.
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Natalie Portman found love on the set of 2010’s “Black Swan” after falling for Benjamin Millepied, a French dancer who choreographed the film. At the 2017 Vulture Festival, Natalie was asked whether she was more excited about earning an Academy Award for her starring performance in the movie or meeting her spouse on the project. “Yeah. The husband more,” she responded. “It was really special and making it was really wonderful and so fun. It was really incredible.” The couple married in 2012 and share two children, son Aleph and daughter Amalia.
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It wasn’t mutual love at first sight for Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green, who announced their separation in mid-2020 after nearly a decade of marriage. The “Beverly Hills, 90210” actor revealed in a 2019 interview on Barstool Sports’ “KFC Radio” podcast that he initially turned down Megan after she showed interest. “She was doing ‘Hope and Faith’ at the time here in New York with Kelly Ripa and Faith Ford, and I came and did an episode of it,” he explained of their first encounter. “I met Megan on that, and she was really young [just 17]. And I was like, ‘This isn’t this. This can’t f****** happen. This isn’t going to happen, no way.’ And so I left and she was just really persistent — and thank God.” After Brian repeatedly “kept pushing her away early on,” he explained, Megan — who’s 13 years his junior and pursued him after she turned 18 — told him she was going to date other people. “That’s when I realized I was, like, ‘I must be really into this situation … the thought of that kills me.’ And … we’ve been together now for 15 years.”
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During a March 2019 CNN town hall, Cory Booker detailed how he first met actress Rosario Dawson at a political fundraiser for Ben Jealous, who ran for governor of Maryland in 2018. “She didn’t give me the time of day,” he admitted, adding that when they met for the second time, it was “one of those really awkward experiences.” Explained the former presidential hopeful, “I’m a United States senator, and I had to get up the courage to walk up to her and ask her for her phone number. And [public speaking] doesn’t make me nervous, but that made me nervous.” During a late-2019 appearance on “The Wendy Williams Show,” he revealed that their second meeting took place at a party thrown by comedian Sarah Silverman. “I have a lot of confidence in a lot of areas, but I tell you, I did not feel confidence when I asked for her phone number,” he said. “I walked up to her. It was the end of the party. We had already talked a little bit and people were drifting out, but she and I were kind of lingering. I walked up to her, and I said, ‘Well, how would I contact you if I wanted to get in touch with you?’ And she goes, ‘Oh, you’re asking for my phone number.’ … This was a shy moment for me definitely, but [Rosario] was merciful and gave me her phone number.” The duo have remained friends since ending their romantic relationship in 2021.
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Actress, author and comedy star Ali Wentworth and ABC chief political correspondent and “Good Morning America” co-anchor George Stephanopoulos went out after a mutual pal suggested they might be a good match. “I was living in Los Angeles, I was single… and I had a birthday party, all girls, and everyone said, ‘You know, you have to start dating, Ali.’ And I said, ‘You know what, I live in L.A., it’s either agents or actors — I’m not interested,” she told Jimmy Fallon on his late-night show in 2017. “And one of them said, ‘You should go out with my old boyfriend, [former White House Communications Director] George Stephanopoulos.’ And I said, ‘No, thank you. Not interested. Not my type.’ I grew up in politics in [Washington] D.C., like, no. When is Matthew Perry getting out of rehab? That’s who I want… or Hugh Grant.” But a few weeks later, since she had plans to go to New York anyway, Ali figured why not. “I thought it’ll be a good dinner party story: ‘My date with George Stephanopoulos.’ So I called him up.” They agreed to meet for lunch at Barney’s. Ali joked that she didn’t shower or shave her legs but made sure she’d read The New York Times that day because she assumed George would want to exchange “smart talk.” “We both ordered the crab salad and I’m telling you, by the end of lunch, done. We were engaged two months later, married six months later.” They now have two daughters.
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“Downton Abbey” star Allen Leech met actress wife Jessica Blair Herman in the most Hollywood of ways: He saw her dancing at Entertainment Weekly’s annual Screen Actors Guild Awards party in 2016. Three years later, they were married. “I approached Jessica, who at the time — I think you were dancing with the girls from ‘Orange Is the New Black’ — and I saw you dancing,” the Irish actor told PeopleTV as Jessica looked on. “A friend of mine, Tom, we were about to leave the party and being Irish and having two rubber arms, he said, ‘Do you want one more drink?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, OK,’ went in, ordered, turned around, saw this vision in a velvet dress and said, ‘Tommy, I’m going to dance with that girl.'”
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Mandy Moore and Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith met over social media. “I took a picture of [his band’s] album and posted it on Instagram. Somehow, Taylor saw it and sent a note to me. We started emailing back and forth, then we went on a date and the rest is history. Thanks Instagram, for helping me meet my fiancé,” the “This Is Us” actress told People magazine in October 2017 — a month after Taylor proposed. “We spent hours FaceTiming each other. We fell in love before we’d even really held hands or kissed or anything,” she added. “It was great… I feel incredibly understood and supported. I feel incredibly lucky to have somebody who is like, ‘I got your back.’ I found the right person and I feel like we can handle anything together.” They married in 2018.
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Beyonce had previously revealed that she met husband JAY-Z, who’s 12 years her senior, when she was 18 and started dating him when she was 19, but how, exactly, they got to know one another — let alone where they went on their first date — was a secret… until Jay rapped about it on their 2018 joint album, “Everything is Love.” Producers Cool and Dre told Rolling Stone, “I remember the night he pulled us into his studio and played it for us, he was like, ‘No one knows the story of how we met. This was the first time I’m ever telling this story,'” Dre recalled. Us Weekly reported that on the track “713” — the numbers are the area code for Bey’s native Houston — Jay reveals he met his future wife at MTV’s March 2000 Spring Break festivities in Cancun Mexico, and that they were seated next to one another on the flight home. A few years later, they had their first date at Nobu. “We played it cool at the pool of the Cancun, VMA / Confidence you exude make the fools stay away / Me, I played my room, let the fools have they say / Fate had me sittin’ next to you on the plane / And I knew straight away,” he raps. “The next time we would speak was like two years away / You had a man, you shut it down until you two had a break / I bet that dude rued the day / You kept me up on the phone while you were away / You came back, I let you set the date, Nobu on the plate / I brought my dude to play it cool, my first foolish mistake.”
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“The Avengers” and “How I Met Your Mother” star Cobie Smulders failed to make an impression the first time she met her husband, “Saturday Night Live” alum Taran Killam. “We met [when] he taped a pilot of a television show with a really good friend of mine, and I went up to him — very boldly — ’cause he was really good and I wanted to, you know, give him that compliment, and I said, ‘You were really great on the show, and nice to meet you — I’m Paul’s friend.’ And he does not remember meeting me,” Cobie recalled during a January 2019 appearance on “Busy Tonight.” “[I] made zero impression on my now-husband of like 14 years. … I was also with somebody [at the time]. I was not looking for romance. I was just being a kind person.” Ultimately, the duo connected later when they attended a mutual friend’s 30th birthday party and bonded over being 22 while everyone else was “old and gross.”
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“Jane the Virgin” star Gina Rodriguez met her husband, actor and Muay Thai fighter Joe LoCicero, at work in 2016. “I met [him] on the set of ‘Jane.’ So ‘Jane’ gave me a lot of things — not only an amazing life and a dream come true, but they gave me my love, the love of my life,” she said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in January 2019. “So he came onto ‘Jane.’ He was playing Don Quixote, the stripper. … He came on as a stripper that my mother hired for my bachelorette party and Jane is, like, super-against it and super-terrified and just, like, doesn’t know what to do with all that. But Gina does! I was like, ‘Hey, hold on one second there.’ But actually it was a little different. I met him like six months later in the boxing gym after we shot together, and it was the boxing gym that brought it together.”
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Following a painful 2015 split from her husband of 26 years, manager Narvel Blackstock, country music queen Reba McEntire “was not looking” for love. “Not even interested,” she told People magazine in April 2019. But out of the blue, she found it where she least expected it: Wyoming. Reba went on a vacation tour of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2017, and that’s when she met retired oil geologist-turned-wildlife photographer Anthony “Skeeter” Lasuzzo, a friend of her buddy Kix Brooks of country duo Brooks & Dunn. (“Skeeter’s the brother of one of my oldest friend’s wives,” Kix later revealed on “The Blair Garner Show.”) The widower showed Reba’s group the best spots for animal sightings and “we just had the best time,” Reba told People. “And so two nights later, we all went out to dinner, and he bought my dinner.” When she returned to Wyoming two months later, Skeeter asked her out. “I was there almost a week and we spent every day together,” she said. In May 2019, however, they decided to go their separate ways, though have remained friends.
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During an interview with DailyMailTV that hit the Internet in July 2019, former “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Phaedra Parks revealed how she and her ex-husband, Apollo Nida, first met back in 1995: He saw her driving on an Atlanta highway and flagged her down. “He saw me, flagged me down, we met and he followed me home and walked up to my doorstep and said, ‘Hey, I want you to be my girlfriend,'” she recalled, adding that at the time, her ex “was extremely nice, always very generous, just a really good guy.” Phaedra met a later love, “The Haves and the Have Nots” actor Medina Islam, on Raya, an exclusive dating app for the rich and famous.
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In March 2019, Chance the Rapper revealed on Twitter that he met his wife, Kirsten Corley, in 2003 when he was just 9 years old and his mom dragged him to an office party where Kirsten — whom he described as “the prettiest girl” he’d seen in his “almost-a-decade of life on Earth” — and two friends performed a choreographed dance routine to Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women.” Chance’s dad then encouraged him to perform a dance routine of his own, but he refused because it “wasn’t the time or place.” Wrote Chance, “I knew I was gonna marry that girl. And I [didn’t] wanna jump the gun.” He then described their marriage as “destiny.”
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Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson’s whirlwind romance in the summer of 2018 might have ended in a broken engagement that fall, but that doesn’t make the former couple’s meet cute any less remarkable. Both appeared on “Saturday Night Live” for the first time on the Season 40 opener — her as the musical guest, him as a new cast member. But they didn’t meet then. That happened in March 2016 when Ariana came back to host and started meeting with “SNL” cast members and writers — including Pete. “I was just, like, listening to him pitch me ideas and stuff and I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ I just thought he was super-dope,” Ariana told the “Zach Sang Show” years later, adding that she grew more intrigued after spotting Pete’s Harry Potter-themed tattoos while she was rehearsing her monologue. After their initial meeting, she told a friend (who confirms her story is true), “I’m going to marry him.” Time went by. “We didn’t even talk for years — we weren’t even friends or anything,” she explained. Fast-forward to May 7, 2018. Ariana’s manager, Scooter Braun encouraged Pete to go hang out with the “Thank U, Next” singer at her New York City apartment after the Met Gala let out that night. “I was f—ing sh—ing my pants,” Pete — who was in sweats and a T-shirt while the pop star was still all dressed up after having attended the fashion benefit — told Howard Stern, explaining that they played “Quiplash” with some of her friends when he arrived. When Ariana’s pals left, “I literally was like, ‘Hi, can I kiss you, please?'” Pete told Howard. A month later, they were engaged.
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For Stephen Colbert, meeting his wife, Evelyn McGee, was all about being in the right place at the right time. When he saw her, he thought, “Her. That’s your wife. You’re going to marry her,” he told his audience on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in 2016 during a Q&A, Entertainment Weekly reported. And he did — in 1993. Here’s how it happened: The comedy star was visiting his family in Charleston, South Carolina, after coming home to have a hard think after a girlfriend he’d been dating for several years told him she waited to either get married or break up. He decided to move on after the ultimatum, which meant he had time to kill while back home, so he went to see the musical “Hydrogen Jukebox” at a theater there and couldn’t take his eyes off a woman in a black linen dress. While in line for food at the afterparty, he told himself, “You will kick yourself for the rest of your life if you do not turn around and say hello to her.” They looked at one another — and realized they knew each other from childhood, as they’d gone to different schools in the same area. After talking for a few hours, Stephen worried she was “just being nice to me because our families know each other. She doesn’t really like me.” He turned away to give her an out, which turned into “the most harrowing minute of my life.” Evie stayed. “She was still there when I turned about, smiling at me,” he told his audience, “and now we’re married.”
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During a 2016 appearance on “The Jonathan Ross Show,” Michael Douglas retold the awkward story of what happened when he met wife Catherine Zeta-Jones for the very first time in 1998. “I was over at the Deauville Film Festival and I saw that [the] next night of the festival, Catherine was going to be there with ‘Zorro,'” he recalled, adding that he asked his publicist to find out if he could have a drink with the Welsh beauty. She agreed and they briefly met in a bar, but Catherine had to go off and do more work that evening so Michael asked her, “‘By chance will you come back if you want to have a nightcap?'” he said. When she returned, he delivered the most cringe-worthy line ever. “She came back after her work and we sat there for a little while and I said to her after about half an hour, ‘You know, I’m going to be the father of your children.’ It sounded good and she said, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you and I’ve seen a lot about you and I think it’s time that I said goodnight.’ And so I thought, ‘I totally blew it… I’ve got to get some roses to her.” He did, and she forgave him. They married in 2000.
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Sarah Jessica Parker met husband Matthew Broderick in November 1991 after she’d ended a long romance with Robert Downey Jr. The “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” star had become friends with her older brothers, Pippin and Toby, when he directed a play for the Naked Angels Theater Company, in which they were involved, so they introduced her. “My memory is that literally months passed when I didn’t ask her for a date,” Matthew told The New York Times. “Your memory is correct,” SJP told him, then informed the NYT reporter that Matthew finally did call on Feb. 1, 1992. “He left a very charming, very self-effacing message on the machine. You know, ‘Hi, it’s Matthew Broderick.’ You had to use your last name.” Quipped Matthew: “I had to give her my credits.” They had their first date at New York City’s Cornelia Street Cafe, married in 1997 and went on to welcome three kids.
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Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott don’t remember exactly where they first met, but their first date — which she says wasn’t even really a first date, but more of a hang that went well, GQ reported in July 2018 — was at the 2017 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. “Coachella was one of the stops on his tour,” Kylie told GQ. “So he said, ‘I’m going back on tour — what do we want to do about this?’ Because we obviously liked each other. And I was like, ‘I guess I’m going with you.’ I really jumped on the [tour] bus. And then we rode off into the sunset. I did the whole tour with him.” That tour is where they really got to know one another and, it seems clear now, where she got pregnant with their daughter, Stormi, who was born in February 2018. “We had a lot of downtime. It was organic. And we would just go to these random cities,” Kylie explained. “We got to not be who we really were. Like, if we were in L.A., I feel like it would’ve been way different. Everything happened for a reason. We weren’t going out as ‘Kylie and Trav.’ We would just be in Cleveland, walking the street for hours. We would go on walks, and no one would bother us.” The pair split in 2019 but reconnected romantically in 2021. In February 2022, they welcomed son Wolf.
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After announcing their engagement in November 2017, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle revealed they were set up by a mutual friend — they’ve refused to name her but it’s believed to be Violet von Westenholz, a member of Harry’s friend circle who reportedly met Meghan though her work doing public relations for Ralph Lauren — in London in July 2016. “We met once and then twice — back-to-back, two dates,” he told the BBC. “And then it was I think about three, maybe four weeks later that I managed to persuade her to come and join me in Botswana. And we camped out with each other under the stars… she came and joined me for five days out there, which was absolutely fantastic. So then we were really by ourselves. Which I think… was crucial to me to make sure we had a chance to get to know each other.” Meghan said that though she knew who Harry was, of course, she didn’t know much about him. “The only thing that I had asked her when she said that she wanted to set us up, was… ‘Well is he nice?’ [We] met for a drink and then I think very quickly into that we said, ‘Well, what are we doing tomorrow? We should meet again.'” Harry wasn’t familiar with Meghan’s acting work when they were introduced. “I’d never watched ‘Suits,’ I’d never heard of Meghan before. And I was beautifully surprised when I walked into that room and saw her. There she was, sitting there. I was like, “Okay, well, I’m really going to have to up my game!'” They married in May 2018.
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In August 2018, comedian Dane Cook — who’s 27 years older than singer-actress girlfriend Kelsi Taylor, who was a teenager when they started dating in May 2017 — revealed in a fan Q&A on his Instagram Story how they first met. “We met at a game night I host at my place,” he wrote. “We were friends for a while & soon after fell in like with each [other] and then upgraded to love.”
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On a November 2019 episode of “Sunday TODAY with Willie Geist,” Kristen Bell made it clear that it wasn’t exactly love at first sight when she first met her now-husband, Dax Shepard, at a birthday dinner for “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” producer Shauna Robertson in 2007. “I had just gotten out of a long-term relationship like two months prior, and in retrospect, I realize he had just gotten out of a long relationship. … The only thing that I remember is that he talked so much. I was like, ‘This guy can talk!'” she recalled. “I didn’t know who he was. I’m like, ‘Maybe is that one of the guys from ‘Jacka**’ or something?’ … He remembers, ‘You were telling a really intense story about a deal you had gotten at Target,’ and I was like, ‘That sounds like it’s on brand.’ And then we left. There were no sparks whatsoever. None.” Two weeks later, they met again at a hockey game and “started to flirt.” The following day, he texted her. Dished the actress, “I get a text that says, ‘Hi, my name is Dax. I violated your privacy and got your number from Shauna. How do you feel about that?’ And I was like, ‘Excuse me? You sound stimulating.’ … He’s so bold, and that was my kind of person. I was like, ‘OK, starting it off with a really good joke that makes me feel, like, butterflies.” Added the “Frozen” star, “I fell in love with him way before he fell in love with me.”
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The story of how Alessandro Nivola met Emily Mortimer, whom he married in 2003, is insane. It was the late ’90s, and Alessandro had just moved to Los Angeles to try to make it as an actor, he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2018. He developed a friendship with his musician neighbor, Adam Cohen (Leonard Cohen’s son), who, after learning that Alessandro was heading to London to shoot “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” told the actor he had something to give him before he left. Adam dug through some drawers until he found a rolled-up piece of paper and handed it to Alessandro. “[Adam] said, ‘OK, this is the telephone number of the most gorgeous girl in London. I was there touring with my band, and I was called in to audition for ‘Moulin Rouge.’ He said, ‘I was sitting in the waiting room waiting for my audition, and there was this amazing girl sitting there. I struck up a conversation with her. I said, ‘Listen, I’m playing a show tonight. Do you want to come? Can I have your number?'” The woman gave it to him, he called her, and she never called him back. “‘I never saw her again, but you have to call her,'” Adam told Alessandro, who put the piece of paper in his pocket and thought, “whatever.” When he arrived at his hotel in Britain, “There was a packet of information about [my] film there. I opened it up. I was brushing my teeth, looking through it, and I came to this name. It looked familiar. I emptied my pockets out and unrolled the piece of paper. It was her. She was in the movie. So on the first day of rehearsal for the film, I looked around and said, ‘Who’s Emily Mortimer?’ They pointed over to this girl. I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ Adam was right.” Alessandro told her that he had her number and explained why. “Two weeks later, I asked her out. We spent the night [and] we’ve been together ever since.”
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“High School Musical” alum Ashley Tisdale met her husband, composer Christopher French, in 2012 after being introduced by friends. “I think from the moment that him and I met, I just knew it,” she told radio host Ryan Seacrest in 2013. “I was like, ‘OK, this is the guy,’ And he knew the same thing. It doesn’t get any better. I just can’t explain it.” They got engaged eight months later and married in 2014.
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Designer and director Tom Ford fell hard and fast for fashion journalist Richard Buckley in 1986 when they rode in the same elevator. “By the time that elevator landed on the ground floor, I thought, ‘You’re the one.’ That’s it. Click. Sold. It was literally love at first sight,” Tom told People magazine in 2016. “Our eyes locked and within a month we were living together. We have been together ever since.” The couple welcomed a son in 2012 and married in 2014. They were together until Richard’s death in 2021.
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NFL star Sterling Shepard met model wife Chanel Iman at football star Victor Cruz’s 30th birthday party in 2016. “When I was younger, I’d see her in the Victoria’s Secret magazines that my sisters were getting, but it didn’t really come to me [when I saw her at the party],” he told Haute Living magazine in 2019. “When she walked into the room one of my boys was like, ‘You know who that is?’ and I was like, ‘No.’ I approached her and asked her if she wanted a drink, and we were just talking for the rest of the party, and then we went to some club for the afterparty and kept talking. I got her number, and we went our own separate ways, but we stayed in contact. It was kind of crazy.” The couple have been married since 2018.
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Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin had to come together before they could consciously uncouple. During her “Iron Man 3” press tour in 2013, Gwyneth told reporters the story of how they met: In a nutshell, rumors brought them together. “It’s funny because people had started writing that we were going out and we had never even met,” she explained. “And then he was in Los Angeles doing a concert and an actress that he had a crush on was supposed to come to the concert. When she didn’t show up, he was so annoyed that he said, ‘Oh, this is for my girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow.'” That sparked new rumors that they were dating. “I was like, ‘I’ve never met this guy, I’ve no idea!’ And because of that, because people were writing about it, we ended up meeting at a concert and there you go. So, thank you!” Gwyneth added. The actress and the musician finally came face-to-face when she decided to attend a Coldplay gig in 2002. “Because they had written so much in the press, his assistant came to my seat at the concert,” Gwyneth explained. “They said, ‘This is so crazy, but will you come back and say hello afterwards?’ And that was it.” The pair split in 2016 after 13 years of marriage.
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Ed Sheeran met Cherry Seaborn when they were schoolmates in England. “I’ve known Cherry since I was 11,” the music star told People magazine. While he went off to pursue his singing and songwriting career, she played field hockey at Duke University and later got a job on Wall Street. “I had like, six shows [around New York in 2015]. It was around then, and we reconnected. I went on tour again, and then I went to [Taylor Swift’s] Fourth of July party. I was texting [Cherry], and she was like, ‘I’m in Rhode Island at a Fourth of July party,’ and I was like, ‘So am I.’ I kinda said to Taylor, ‘Can I invite one of my old schoolmates?’ The rest is history.” The couple got engaged over the holidays in 2017 and tied the knot not long after.
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In the summer of 2017 during a weekend visit to Martha’s Vineyard, comedian Amy Schumer’s assistant invited her brother, chef Chris Fischer, over to cook for them (Chris is a James Beard Award-winning culinary expert and cookbook author who owns and runs his family’s Beetlebung Farm in Martha’s Vineyard). Amy then asked Chris to help her plan a birthday party for a pal and sparks flew. Chris, Amy explained on Howard Stern’s radio show in April 2018, made the first move. “He came up behind me and he put his arms around me and he kissed my neck, and it was on,” she said. “And then we were just so open with each other.” The pair fell hard and fast and married in February 2018 in Malibu.
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In his 2018 book “Hindsight & All the Things I Can’t See in Front of Me,” Justin Timberlake opened up about how his relationship with wife Jessica Biel started and later blossomed. They met at a surprise party in a private Hollywood speakeasy-style where they were talking in a group. “I made some sort of sarcastic comment, really dry. Nobody got it except her,” she explained. “We talked that night. The DJ played ‘Lucky Star,’ and we danced. And then she was gone.” He kept thinking about her, and when a mutual friend asked to bring Jessica to the opening night of JT’s “FutureSex/LoveShow” tour in San Diego on Jan. 8, 2007, Justin was thrilled. He gave the actress and her friends a ride to the next city, which was closer to Los Angeles, on his tour bus. That night, Justin — who’d recently split from Cameron Diaz — got her number. They spoke on the phone for days, met up at a Golden Globes party a week later and “from that moment on, we started dating.” But they weren’t exclusive — yet. “We were both still seeing other people, keeping ourselves safe from getting hurt, from really putting ourselves out there. It took a bit for both of us to admit to ourselves that we were really, really that into each other,” Justin explained in his book. “When I came back from tour, we spent a month together. After that, I said, ‘I really want to be exclusive.’ And, somehow, she said, ‘So do I.'”
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Despite a 17-year age difference, Bradley Cooper and English model-actress Suki Waterhouse experienced an instant attraction when both attended an award show in 2013. “I met him at the ELLE Style Awards in London last year,” she told Rollacoaster magazine in 2014. “We were introduced and hit it off almost immediately. We were dancing at the afterparty, and he asked me if I fancied going to a club. We went to Cirque Le Soir in London — and he’s a ridiculously good dancer, yes. But I’m a serious dancer too, so I don’t know if I was fully concentrating on that. We make a pretty good duo though.” They called it quits in 2015.
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“The Big Bang Theory” star Jim Parsons and graphic designer Todd Spiewak have been together for 15 years — and they owe it all to two friends who set them up on a blind date. “What’s funny is they went out with us on the date, which was really smart, ’cause it felt very social and it felt very good and we were able to just kind of really just be relaxed with it,” Jim told Andy Cohen on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live” in May 2017. “We were planning the next date by the end of the night.” These days, Jim — who married Todd on May 13, 2017, at New York City’s Rainbow Room — is the highest paid actor on television (along with co-stars Kaley Cuoco and Johnny Galecki). But things were a lot different when he and Todd started their romance. “He had kind of supported me for the first few years of our relationship because he had a normal job and I was working acting jobs and so when I finally was making my own money on a TV show, it was a relief, certainly to me. It was a nice, different balance,” Jim told Andy.
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Sparks flew when George Clooney met British barrister Amal Alamuddin for the first time in July 2013 — and his parents were there to witness it all. “We met in Lake Como. She was a friend of a friend who came to visit and then I chased her for many months, calling and writing, those kinds of things,” George told David Letterman in 2015. George’s father, journalist Nick Clooney, recounted that magical night when Amal and George were introduced at a dinner gathering the actor was hosting at his home. “[George’s mom] Nina and I were actually the ones who answered the door when Amal came in,” Nick told People in June 2017. “She introduced herself to us and we talked. She was obviously very charming, gorgeous and so clearly accomplished, but by the time we had supper that night, it was clear there was a kindness to her and an inclusiveness.” By the time the dinner was over, “his and her fates were sealed, both of them. She was so remarkable and he was so remarkable around her,” Nick added. “This young woman meant something to him almost immediately. It was just amazing.” As Nick got to know Amal, things crystallized further. “It was just different than all the other relationships I had seen him in, and I had watched them all from the time he was 13,” Nick said. Just one year later in September 2014, they married in Venice, Italy, and the bride changed her name to Amal Clooney.
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Incredibly private couple Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender first “properly” met, they told “Entertainment Tonight,” during 2014 rehearsals for their film “The Light Between Oceans.” But while promoting the movie in 2016, Alicia revealed they’d actually shared a moment before that official introduction. “We had met at [the] Toronto Film Festival,” she said, “on the dance floor.” Added Michael: “I thought [I was a good dancer] until she started dancing and then I felt like I had two left feet.” He also admitted that their chemistry “was sort of there from the beginning.” The pair married in October 2017.
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Sarah Hyland and “The Bachelorette” and “Bachelor in Paradise” alum Wells Adams are another couple who met via social media. “The internet — it’s amazing,” the radio DJ said on “The Morning Breath” in November 2017, confirming how they first connected — a confession that came just days after he and the “Modern Family” actress went public with their romance (they dressed up as characters from “Stranger Things” for Halloween and posted pics on social media, natch). In January 2018, Sarah visited Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show and revealed of Wells, “He slide into my DMs.” For their first date, they went out for tacos and drinks. “We have an obsession with tacos. Tacos and tequila, it’s our thing,” she explained. It all started back in July 2017 when Sarah started flirting with Wells over Twitter. “Ugh! @WellsAdams making a Lord of the Flies reference on men tell all??? #knewhewasthebestfromthestart #menwhoreadarehot,” she tweeted, following it up with, “Also @WellsAdams compared Chad to Voldemort. #potterheadsarethebest.” In August, she tweeted him again after seeing him on “BiP.” “OH MY GOD @WellsAdams IS THE FRIKKIN BARTENDER?! Best. Season. Ever.” she wrote. Minutes later, he responded: “Taking applications for #BIP5 bar backs now. Please send references..Preferably from Phil Dunphy. I’m kidding the job is yours @Sarah_Hyland.” They got engaged in 2019.
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Superstar Jennifer Lopez and baseball legend Alex Rodriguez technically met back in 2005 when J.Lo’s then-husband, Marc Anthony, threw out the first pitch at a Yankees game. But during an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Jennifer revealed the story of what led them to reconnect and go on their first date early in 2017. It turns out that J.Lo and A-Rod were having lunch at the same Los Angeles restaurant. She saw him walk by and decided to approach him outside. “For some reason I just felt like tapping him on the shoulder. And I said, ‘Hi, Alex,’ and he’s like, ‘Hi, Jennifer,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah’ and then that was it,” she said, laughing. “I mean, more stuff happened, but that’s how we met.” I said, ‘What are you doing in L.A.?’ and he said, ‘I live out here now,’ and he said, ‘What about you?’ and I said, ‘I’ve always lived out here.’ … And then he was like, ‘We should hang out,’ and I said, ‘OK.’ He texted me, he said, ‘Let’s go out to dinner,’ I said ‘OK.’ … We had a nice dinner.” Ellen then asked, “And then a sleepover?” to which J.Lo responded, “No. Mama don’t sleep over on the first date!” That “nice dinner” took place at the Hotel Bel-Air — but while J.Lo was under the impression it was definitely a date, Alex wasn’t so sure at first. “I went in uneasy, not knowing her situation,” he told Vanity Fair, explaining that he thought meeting with “one of the smartest, greatest women in the world… would be a win-win no matter what.” Thankfully, he finally got the message. “She told me around the third or fourth inning that she was single. I had to get up and go re-adjust my thoughts. I went to the bathroom and got enough courage to send her a text,” he said. They both laughed when J.Lo revealed what it said: “You look sexy AF.” They got engaged in 2019 but went their separate ways in 2021.
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Hugh Jackson met his wife of more than two decades, Deborra-lee Furness, when he landed a part — his first after getting out of drama school — on her Australian TV series “Correlli.” “Deb, she was a big star. I get picked up, and Deb is in the front seat of the car. I’ll never forget. She took off her seatbelt and she turned around and put out her hand and took off her sunglasses and said, ‘Hi, I’m Deborra-lee Furness, nice to meet you.’ I remember thinking, ‘I like this girl,'” Hugh told People TV’s “The Jess Cagle Interview” in 2017. They grew close over the next few weeks. “Deb and I were already best friends and I realized, I’ve got a crush on my leading lady. This is the thing you do not do. It’s unprofessional and embarrassing.” So what did he do? Ignored her. “I didn’t talk to Deb for a week. Then I was like, ‘This is not a good plan.'” He switched gears and invited 20 friends over for a dinner party and asked Deb for a hand in the kitchen making crêpes suzette. “She said, ‘I noticed you haven’t talked to me in like a week, what’s going on?’ I said, ‘I got a crush on you. I’ll get over it, I’m sorry.’ She goes, ‘Oh? Because I’ve got a crush on you too.’ I never in a million years thought she reciprocated.” They married in 1996 and now have two kids.
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Though Kate Mara and Jamie Bell co-starred in 2015’s “Fantastic Four” film reboot, they actually first crossed paths years earlier. “We met, like, 10 years before,” Kate revealed during a May 2017 appearance on “Watch What Happens Live.” “We did a screen test together and we had to kiss and it was very — I had to kiss many guys that day for the screen test.” Did they get the parts? “Neither of us did!” she said. Kate and Jamie, who split from first wife Evan Rachel Wood in 2014, were nothing but friends and colleagues while actually filming “Fantastic Four.” They developed feelings for one another after they hung up their superhero suits. Explained Kate: “We fell in love on the press tour.” They married in 2017.
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Yes, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr. met while making the campy 1997 teen horror classic “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” But no, that’s not when they started dating. That came three years later. “We had made plans for dinner [at a sushi restaurant] with a mutual friend and the person canceled,” SMG told People after their 2002 wedding. “We decided to have dinner anyway and never looked back.”
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“My husband and I met in a house fire, basically,” Kate Winslet told Ellen DeGeneres in 2014 of how she and third husband Ned Rocknroll came into one another’s lives. In August 2011, Kate and then-boyfriend Louis Dowler, a model, were staying on Virgin mogul Richard Branson’s Necker Island — as was Richard’s nephew Ned, a former Virgin galactic exec — when lightning ignited a fire that destroyed Richard’s luxury compound. Kate soon split from Louis and started dating Ned (who was born Abel Smith; in 2019, Ned went back to his original surname), whom she married in 2012. They welcomed son Bear Blaze Winslet in 2013. “The house burned down and we survived. But we wanted something of the fire,” Kate told Ellen of the inspiration for their son’s middle name.
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Ricky Martin met Syrian-born Swedish artist Jwan Yosef on Instagram. “I’m scrolling and I see this beautiful piece of art and I’m like, ‘Whoa, how cool! Who’s this?’ Then I start checking and all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Ooh, ooh.’ ” And then I wrote to him,” Ricky said on Andy Cohen’s “Radio Andy” show in 2017. “Then we were talking for like six months without me hearing his voice. We talked about art — nothing sexy… I swear, nothing sexy. It was all about art and life in general. He used to live in London, I went to London and I met him.” When they were finally face to face, Ricky told Attitude magazine in 2018, “[I thought], ‘I am marrying this guy.’ And apparently he said exactly the same thing. Obviously he only told me this later on, you have to keep it to yourself at first! But I lost my breath when I saw him. Six months’ build-up and it was very romantic.” They got engaged in 2016 and in early 2018, Ricky revealed they’d quietly tied the knot.
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It was love at first sight for these two reality TV stars! “We met through a mutual friend … [and] went on a blind date,” Christina Anstead told “Extra!” in 2019 of how she got together with future-ex-husband Ant Anstead in 2017, adding that they chatted on FaceTime for about two hours the first time they connected and then “met at a restaurant with a group of people. It was love at first sight, and we’ve been together ever since.” She even predicted that they were going to get hitched. “I told my dad at a hockey game a week after we met that we were going to get married,” the “Flip or Flop” star said of her British “Wheeler Dealers” host husband. They tied the knot in 2018 and welcomed their first child together, son Hudson, in 2019, before Christina decided to end the marriage in 2020.
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Lauren Conrad revealed in a 2016 blog post how she and husband William Tell first met and later reconnected. “I met my husband when I was 16 and sitting on stage at one of his concerts,” she explained. (He used to play rhythm guitar in the Orange County, California, band Something Corporate.) “Ten years later, we were set up on a blind date.” A lot happened in that decade: She became a famous reality star, designer and author and he left the music industry to go to law school. They married in 2014.
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In March 2015, Kourtney Kardashian shared an epic throwback pic on Instagram: A snapshot from the night she met baby daddy (and now-ex) Scott Disick at “Girls Gone Wild” mogul Joe Francis’ vacation home in Mexico in 2006. “#FBF The night I met @letthelordbewithyou,” she captioned the photo that shows a baby-faced Scott and Kourtney on either side of Joe. “Scott came as the guest as a friend of mine,” Joe told In Touch magazine in 2010, “and they met in my master bedroom.”
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Khloe Kardashian’s relationship with NBA player Tristan Thompson started in 2016 after a mutual friend set them up. “I was put on a blind date with Tristan. That’s how I met Tristan,” Khloe said on September 2017’s “Keeping Up With the Kardashians Ten Year Anniversary Special.” “Brandon Jennings, who is a basketball player, he is a friend of mine and Malika [Haqq]’s… was like, ‘You’re such a good girl, I want to introduce you to someone.'” Brandon then brought Tristan along to a group dinner. “I was at the Bel-Air Hotel. He came to the dinner. I didn’t want to go on a blind date,” Khloe added. “So Brandon kind of ambushed the blind date. So I had a bunch of people, and he brought him and we just connected.” Things got serious fast: About a year after they were first publicly linked, the world learned that Khloe was pregnant. She gave birth to their daughter, True, in April 2018 just two days after photos and videos surfaced revealing Tristan had been unfaithful to her during her pregnancy. But rather than leave him, Khloe controversially chose to give him another chance…. until he stepped out on her again, this time with Kylie Jenner’s BFF, model Jordyn Woods, in February 2019, which led Khloe to dump him, though they quietly reconciled the following year… only to split again in 2021 in the wake of more cheating claims.
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Maybe this is why things didn’t work out between Kim Kardashian West and Reggie Bush. For their first date back in 2007, “We went to Chipotle and the car wash,” Kim told Pop Tarts in 2010, the same year they split. “I picked him up from the car wash and then we ate at Chipotle. Very sexy.” She added that it took him a minute to warm up to her. “My first impression of Reggie was, ‘This guy is so quiet. Why is he not taking my number? No!'” Kim said. “His friend [then-Arizona Cardinals quarterback] Matt Leinart tried to set us up but it took a while.”
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The public didn’t even really know Jeffrey Dean Morgan and wife Hilarie Burton, who married in 2019, were a couple until after she’d given birth to their first child, son Gus, in 2010. Now they have a second child, daughter George, who arrived in early 2018. But how did they meet? Mutual friend Jensen Ackles set them up on a blind date in 2009. Jensen, who was pals with his “Supernatural” co-star Jeffrey, and wife Danneel Harris, who was friends with her “One Tree Hill” co-star Hilarie, convinced their buddies to come out with them one night. “I [got drunk]. We all did. We ended up back at my house drinking shots of tequila,” Jeffrey told HuffPost Live in 2015. That summer, Hilarie joined him in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he was shooting “The Resident,” and their son arrived early the next year.
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During a joint interview with GQ that debuted online in July 2020, Quavo and Saweetie dished on how they first connected on Instagram when the Migos rapper spotted her on his Explore page. He then researched the “Icy Grl” rapper before sliding into her DMs. “I told her, ‘You an icy girl, you need a glacier boy,'” he recalled of his opening line. After chatting via direct messages, they graduated to phone calls. Months later, he invited her to a big party in Los Angeles. She then ghosted him. “I was trying to play hard to get,” she revealed. They later had their first real date in Atlanta. After he choked on a crab cake at a fancy restaurant, he gave her a tour of the Quality Control Music studios. They then headed to a strip club, where a fight broke out. During the ensuing fray, Quavo and Saweetie got separated. He raced back to the car … and momentarily forgot he was on a date. “She catches up and cussed me out in front of [the club],” he said, adding that they ultimately smoothed things over. They dated for more than two years before breaking up in 2021.
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Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively worked together on 2011’s “Green Lantern,” but their first date came much later — and, technically, it wasn’t their first date. “I remember it was funny because for about a year after ‘Green Lantern’ had come and gone and all that stuff we were both single,” Ryan said during an appearance on Entertainment Weekly’s SiriusXM Radio show in 2016. “We went on a double date with — she was on a date with another guy, and I was on a date with another girl, and that was the most awkward date from their perspective probably because we were just like fireworks coming across. Yeah, it was like this first weird [date] — but we were buddies for a long time. I think it’s the best way to have a relationship — to start as friends.” The actors married in 2012.
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Angela Bassett met her husband of more than 20 years, actor Courtney B. Vance, decades ago when they were in drama school. “He had a beautiful, beautiful girlfriend at the time, who was also in drama school with us,” Angela told People TV’s “The Jess Cagle Interview” in 2018. “So maybe about 14 years later, our paths crossed here in Los Angeles. And I was single, he was single. And I had such an appreciation for him over those years — of his consistency, how he treated other people, of what a supporter he is, what a connector of people and ideas he is, how passionate he is.” They married in 1997 and welcomed twins in 2006.
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Katy Perry met former husband Russell Brand in 2009 on a movie set. “When he was filming ‘Get Him to the Greek,’ I did a cameo with him,” she told Glamour in 2010. “My scene [which later got cut] called for me to make out with him. And on the way down the stairs after the scene, I was hopping like a bunny. I hop like a bunny when I’m happy — I get a bit childlike.” They saw each other again at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards later that summer and were soon inseparable. Russell proposed during a New Year’s trip to India just a few months later. They married 10 months after that, but just 14 months in, Russell told Katy he wanted a divorce — giving her the message via text, she told Vogue.
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“Teen Wolf” alum Colton Haynes and floral-designer-to-the-stars Jeff Leatham got engaged in March 2017, got married (Kris Jenner officiated!) just seven months later, then filed for divorce just six months after that — only to reconcile in time for their one-year wedding anniversary… then split again. Colton told People magazine that mutual friends (including Serena Williams) had tried to set them up four years before they met. But at the time, Colton was living in Vancouver shooting “Arrow” and Jeff was based in France, where he’s the artistic director at the Four Season Georges V. “We were going to meet up for a date but we ended up not being able to. And then years went by,” Colton explained. Then something crazy happened: In January 2017, Jeff recognized the actor at 7 a.m. in an airport lounge in Paris (Colton had been in town for a fashion show) and approached him. “I hit him in the back with my Louis Vuitton bag and he turned around and I said, ‘Hey, Colton.’ And he said, ‘Oh hey, Jeff.’ And we actually fell in love,” Jeff told People. They realized they were on the same flight to Los Angeles and sitting just three rows apart. “We passed Post-It notes back and forth and ended up exchanging numbers,” Colton shared. “He wanted me to cuddle with him on the plane and I said, ‘No, you’re moving too fast.’ But eventually he just pulled me down and we cuddled. I got home and a day later I got this huge delivery of flowers delivered to my house with a card that said, ‘What movies are made of.'”
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Gloria Estefan met husband Emilio Estefan at a jam session with mutual friends in 1975. “In comes Emilio. He’s playing the accordion in very short shorts and he looked like he was naked, so that was the first impression that I got,” Gloria told host Lara Spencer on a “Celebrity Love Stories” episode of the People magazine and ABC News series “People Icons” in 2017. “Then my mom drags me to a wedding a few months later and I walk in the door and there [he is] playing ‘The Hustle.’ He tracked me down two weeks later.” They soon started performing in a wedding band together. “We had chemistry for sure. But he had an older girlfriend, and he was my boss,” she explained. They eventually fell for one another and went to the theater to see “Young Frankenstein” on their first date, which is when “I knew I was going to marry this man,” Gloria added. They wed in 1978 and later welcomed two kids.
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Pop star Meghan Trainor met former child actor Daryl Sabara (Juni Cortez from the “Spy Kids” franchise!) through a mutual friend — actress Chloe Grace Moretz. “I asked every person I met since day one, ‘Find me a boyfriend!'” Meghan told Chelsea Handler on an episode of her Netflix show in 2016. “I was like, ‘You know anybody that I could date? Or love? Whatever. And she’s like, ‘I know the nicest guy in the world, Daryl, and you should meet him.’ I was like, ‘Daryl? Okay.'” For their first date, they went bowling and sang karaoke with another couple — and shared their first kiss. “He kissed me at the bowling alley,” Meghan told Cosmopolitan’s May 2017 issue. “I told my security to step outside ’cause I didn’t want to be watched. LOL.” Daryl made a great impression. “He was the best kisser ever.” He popped the question in December 2017 and they wed one year later.
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It took time for Evan Peters to fall for future-ex-girlfriend Emma Roberts. “We met on the movie [‘Adult World’ in 2012]. Everyone thought we dated on the movie and we didn’t, not for a long time after,” she said on “Chelsea Lately” a few years later. “I actually, on the set, was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re totally gonna date.’ And I would, like, flirt with him, which ended up looking like I had something in my eye because I’d be like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ And he literally didn’t speak to me the entire movie. He thought I was so weird.” She also told Nylon magazine that she and Evan “didn’t get along, actually… But it turned out that we both liked each other, so months later, we started dating, which worked out for the best.” What sparked their eventual hookup? “He texted me and then we got together,” she told Chelsea Handler. They split in 2019.
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It wasn’t love at first sight for Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. “I met him when I was 19 at an audition for ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,'” Jada told Your Tango in 2007. “After we had known each other for many years, we went out for dinner one night [with mutual friends] and I saw that he had grown from this lanky kid to this really responsible man. We started courting each other and our friendship turned into romance.” Their first date was epic: “He took me to Mexico!” she said. But Jada couldn’t remember their first kiss. “I think it was in Mexico. Will’s the one who remembers that kind of stuff.” The actors married in 1997.
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Channing Tatum and future-ex-wife Jenna Dewan fell for one another while filming 2006’s “Step Up.” But while she wanted a commitment, he wasn’t sure what he wanted — at first. She told him, “Well look, if you want to date other people and be free, that’s totally fine. But we’re not gonna hang out and watch movies. You’ve got to figure out what you want ’cause I know I want to be in a relationship,” Jenna told Ellen DeGeneres in April 2017. Channing figured it out three days later after a “crazy, wild tequila night” with the movie’s dancers and came knocking on her hotel room door at 2 a.m. “He said he had the chance to be free and he couldn’t stop thinking about me,” Jenna said. The best part? He was wearing nothing but underwear, a sombrero and Ugg boots, she added, “and he’s like ‘Let’s do this.'” In April 2018, the pair announced they’d split after nearly nine years of marriage.
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“The Voice” alum Cassadee Pope and “Nashville” actor and singer Sam Palladio had known each other socially for years by the time they went on their first date in late 2017. “We met a long time ago — I think it was at a CMA afterparty — and it was like a hi-bye, never saw him again, never hung out,” she told People magazine in March 2018. “And then, gosh, I think it was December of last year, we decided to take our dogs to the dog park… and we hit it off! I think the original idea [for the date] was his and then I was like, ‘How about tomorrow?'”
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Jordin Sparks and husband Dana Isaiah have their families to thank for inadvertently setting them up. While traveling to Houston for Super Bowl weekend in February 2017, the “American Idol” alum met Dana’s family. A few weeks later, he told his mom he was thinking about moving to Hollywood to pursue his modeling career so his mom and Jordin’s mom put their kids on a group text. “My mom was trying to get [Jordin] to talk me out of moving to L.A. because she’s experienced the industry out here,” he told People magazine in November. “It wasn’t like, ‘We want you guys to date.'” But the two soon realized they had a connection. According to People, they bonded over their close families and Christian faith and when Dana flew to L.A. for an agency meeting, he finally met Jordin in person over Easter weekend. She fell hard and fast. “A couple days after we had actually met, I was like in my head, ‘That’s going to be my husband! That’s my husband right there,'” she told People. “When I’m with him, I feel comfort and safety and calm and peace, and those aren’t things that I normally felt. So it was a little wake-up call for me.” They eloped that July while vacationing in Hawaii with friends and welcomed their first child, son D.J., in May 2018.
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Like many people, comedian Patton Oswalt and actress Meredith Salenger met over social media — though they had a little help from a famous friend. “We met online… We met because we have a mutual friend, the actress Martha Plimpton, and she threw a dinner party and she invited both of us, neither of us knew each other, we’d never met, and at the last minute I couldn’t go because of some travel stuff and so the next day — we have all these mutual friends on Facebook — Meredith sent me a message saying, ‘You missed some amazing lasagna last night, dude.’ That was on Feb. 28 [when] we started talking,” Patton recalled during a November 2017 appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “We didn’t meet face to face until May 20.” Patton — whose first wife, crime writer Michelle McNamara, unexpectedly died in April 2016 — explained how he fell for Meredith long before they actually met. “It was very Victorian-like, exchanging-letters kind of romance. Like every night we would just write back and forth about everything — life and politics and books — we did all of the deep stuff you do after you have the first date. So by the time we met on our first date I was so head over heels.” He moved fast after that: Patton proposed in July 2017 and the pair got married on Nov. 4 at Jim Henson Studios.
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Chrissy Metz and future-ex-boyfriend Josh Stancil met at work. In August 2016, they were wrapping the second episode of “This Is Us” — she was starring as Kate Pearson, he was working as a camera grip — when she saw him eating a taco bowl while putting stuff away in his truck, she told Marie Claire. “I was like, oh he’s cute, with shorts and his backward hat, kind of masculine,” she told the magazine. “Before I even know it, I called out, ‘You better slow down or you’re going to choke on your food.’ I am typically a little more charismatic than that, I swear.” After a month of exchanging hellos on set, “it was very unexpected,” she added, when Josh asked her out for a drink. They started dating and a few months later made their red carpet debut as a couple at a 2017 SAG Awards party. In March 2018, Chrissy confirmed they’d split.
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According to Victoria Beckham, it was love at fight sight for her and husband David Beckham. In 2016, the Spice Girl-turned-fashion designer wrote a letter to her younger self, which was published in British Vogue, and explained how she and David, then a major soccer star, met: “It will happen to you in the Manchester United players’ lounge — although you will get a little drunk, so exact details are hazy. While the other football players stand at the bar drinking with their mates, you will see David standing aside with his family. (He’s not even in the first team at this stage — you are the famous one.) And he has such a cute smile. You, too, are close to your family, and you will think how similar he feels to you. He’s going to ask for your number.” David also dished about falling for her in his autobiography — and admitted that both had a thing for one another before they ever met, thanks to their fame in Britain, which only multiplied once they got together and married in 1999. “My wife picked me out of a soccer sticker book. And I chose her off the telly,” he wrote. “It felt straight away like we’d always been meant to be together.”
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Reese Witherspoon met second husband Jim Toth, a Hollywood talent agent, at a friend’s party. But it was a messy introduction. “It happened out of the blue,” she told ELLE in 2013. “This really drunk guy was hitting on me, making such an idiot of himself, yelling at me… Jim came over and said, ‘Please excuse my friend. He’s just broken up with someone.'” Reese was impressed. “Jim was a really good friend, pulling [his drunk friend] out of that situation. That’s just kind of who he is, a really good person.” They married in 2011 and welcomed son Tennessee the following year.
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“Ballers” actor Dulé Hill and actress Jazmyn Simon got engaged in April 2017 when the “West Wing” and “Psych” alum popped the question on bended knee with an enormous oval diamond ring after a hot air balloon ride. They married a year later in Guatamala. None of it would have happened if not for “Ballers.” “I met Dulé at lunch,” Jazmyn told “Home & Family” in 2016. “I was supposed to be in Miami for two days to shoot the ‘Ballers’ pilot, and my two days turned into two weeks because I was at the end of the second day and my scene got bumped.” Dulé had flown in for just one day of shooting. “I went to set and I saw him, just me and him at the end of the table, and I was like, ‘Oh, I know you. You’re Dulé!'” she said. “And I went and we exchanged numbers and the rest is history.”
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When teen actress Bella Thorne was spotted on a dinner date with reality star Scott Disick in May 2017, it raised eyebrows. Weeks later, they made headlines again when they were photographed canoodling in Cannes. But days later, Bella flew home, tweeting “Yo, this #cannes fancy life isn’t for me.” Their short-lived friendship-turned-fling was clearly over, but fans still wondered: How on earth had the two met? In June 2017, Bella explained all to Complex magazine. “I throw a lot of house parties, and that’s how I meet these people. They come to my house party and they’re like, ‘Yo, I heard you’re having a party,’ and I’m just like, ‘Okay, French Montana. Hi, French.’ That’s how I met Scott — he came to a house party of mine [with French] and I was like ‘Hi.'” But after hanging out with him in Cannes, she was over it. “Scott is really nice, sweet, charming,” Bella told Complex. “I don’t drink, and he really drinks a lot. And it just ended up… I just wasn’t down… I just don’t party hardcore like that and it was way too much for me. I was like, ‘Woah, this is not the way I live my life, bruh.'” So now we know!
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Matt Damon was in Miami shooting 2003’s “Stuck On You” when he met the woman who would become his wife. “We ended up at a bar where my wife was the bartender. I literally saw her across a crowded room and eight years and four kids later, that’s my life,” he told Ellen DeGeneres in 2011 of how he met Luciana Barroso. “I don’t know how else our paths would have crossed if that didn’t happen. The moral is that when you’re tired, suck it up and go to the bar because you might meet your wife.” They wed in 2005.
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Like so many people, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone met at work. Back in 2012 while promoting their movie, “The Amazing Spider-Man,” Andrew revealed to Teen Vogue how he met Emma during the casting process. “It was like I woke up when she came in. She was the last person to screen test, and I was so bored of it by then that I was mucking about,” he said. “And then she came in, and it was like diving into whitewater rapids and having no desire to hang on to the side. Throughout shooting, it was wild and exciting. I couldn’t help but try to stay with her, keep pace with her, and not let her get away.” They split in 2015.
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Destiny’s Child singer Michelle Williams got engaged to pastor and life coach Chad Johnson in March 2018, one year after they met at an Elevate International spiritual retreat in Arizona that he was running, she told People magazine. They hit it off right away, but neither pursued a romance during the retreat. “I mean, he was cute,” Michelle told People, “but I did not go to flirt with the pastor!” They did, however, keep in touch afterward. “I tried to roll in with some mac daddy game and I tried to flirt a little bit and said something like, ‘How about you and I connect sometime?’ And right away, she texted right back with one word and six question marks behind it: ‘Connect??????'” Chad, who’s worked as a chaplain for pro sports teams including the Pittsburgh Steelers, told People. “I thought she had dissed me. So I was embarrassed and I didn’t reach back out to her because I thought I’d ruined the friendship.” Nope. A week later, Michelle slid into his DMs on Instagram and soon they were sharing late-night FaceTime calls. “We spent almost three months without even seeing each other, just building a strong foundation on the phone and through FaceTime; it was really built on friendship and communication,” Chad explained. They shared their first kiss that July. In late 2018, Michelle announced that they’d called off their engagement and split. Though they appeared to briefly rekindle their romance in the spring of 2019, it ultimately wasn’t meant to be.
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Hilary Swank and social venture entrepreneur Philip Schneider quietly got married in Northern California in 2018 following an equally quiet engagement in Colorado 2016. Their love story started just a year and a half before that. “It was a blind date set up by actor Misha Collins’s wife Vicki and another close friend, Jean. We met [for brunch] at 10 a.m. and parted ways at 11 p.m.,” Hilary told Vogue. “We clearly enjoyed our time!”
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“Breaking Bad” star Aaron Paul met his now-wife, Lauren Parsekian, at Coachella (they shared their first kiss on a ferris wheel at the annual music festival). Things moved very quickly after that. “Our first date after Coachella was a trip to Vegas. We bought our first child a baby leather jacket from All Saints. We also jumped into a cab and said, ‘Take us to the nearest chapel. We’re getting married,'” he told ELLE in 2014. “The Little White Chapel ended up being closed. We probably would have gone through with it. It would have been a pretty funny story. But I’m happy we got married when we did — a year later.” Aaron and Lauren welcomed their first child, daughter Story, in February 2018.
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During an early 2019 chat with TMZ in Hollywood, Kate Beckinsale’s ex-boyfriend, comedian Matt Rife, said he met the actress, who’s 22 years his senior, at The Laugh Factory in March 2017 when he was just 21. “We dated for a year and it was complicated, for sure — a lot of ups and downs,” he said.
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During an interview with Page Six that hit the Internet in July 2020, “The Real Housewives of Orange County” alum Meghan King’s then-boyfriend of a few months, Uncharted Supply Company CEO Christian Schauf, said that they met on a dating app. At the time, he’d “never seen any ‘Real Housewives’ shows” before. After they connected and he looked up her Instagram, he was shocked to see that she had “a million followers.” That prompted him to ask a mutual friend, trainer Nancy Anderson, about the reality star. “She was like, ‘Oh she’s great. I trained her. You guys would be great together,'” he recalled, adding that some of his other female friends (pals who’ve watched “RHOC” and keep up with the tabloids) questioned his decision to pursue Meghan. “I just made a conscious decision that I’m not going to dig in too far,” Christian said. The previous month, the mother of three revealed in a blog post that she finally met her Utah-based beau for the first time when he picked her up at the airport. They split later in 2020.
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Celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who divorced actress Stephanie March in 2015, stared dating “Masters of Sex” and “Quantico” actress Helene Yorke in early 2016. In May 2017, he revealed how they met. “So I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” he said during an episode of his Food Network show “Beat Bobby Flay,” where Helene happened to be a guest. “Last season I went to a Knick game and I met Helene. Now we kind of date.” According to her, they hit it off immediately. “I was like who’s this sweet guy? Who knew?” In late 2019, Bobby said he was single, indicating that he and Helene had called it quits.
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Twelve-time Olympic swimming medalist Ryan Lochte and wife Kayla Rae Reid, a model, met online. “We basically met on Instagram [in 2016],” Kayla told People magazine in 2018. Ryan told the mag that Kayla was living in Los Angeles at the time while he was based in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I went to L.A. for training. I was going out to a club and she was going out to the same club with her girlfriends. I was with all my guy friends. I was like, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll finally see each other.” And they did! “We were crossing paths and we reached out and grabbed each others hands being like, ‘Finally!'” Ryan told People. “We had, like, an eight-to-10-hour conversation face to face just talking about what we want in life, our goals, family, everything, and I think right after that, I was like, ‘She’s the one.'” They tied the knot in 2018.
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During a 2017 appearance on Ireland’s “Late Late Show,” professional MMA fighter and boxer Conor McGregor told the story of how he got together with longtime love Dee Devlin nearly a decade earlier. “We met at a friend’s party like way, way back and then the usual social media, a little bit of a like here, and a like there and then a message,” he explained, soliciting laughs from the audience when he admitted that the social media platform they used was Bebo. Conor earlier told VIP Magazine that he first talked to Dee, who gave birth to their first child in 2017, at a nightclub. “I asked her to come over and we just started chatting,” he said. “She seemed like a nice girl, and I like good girls.” He now credits her belief in him as a big reason for his professional success.
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In March 2018, Naomi Campbell and her then-boyfriend, music artist Skepta, appeared on the cover of British GQ together. In a video interview with the magazine, they explained where it all started. “The first time that we met was at the British Fashion Awards,” he said. “2016,” the supermodel chimed in as Skepta added, “She’s like a bullet. Like, she was just goin’, goin’, goin’, like, everyone has to catch up.”
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