Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Young love is beautiful, as we all know from reading Us Weekly, but let’s be real: It’s also chaotic, messy, potentially heartbreaking, and often punctuated by extremely long texts. (I’ll never forget my friend Gavin reading over the draft of a text I had painstakingly typed out to someone who was curving me at the time, and simply saying: “That’s a lot of blue, my dude.”) But what should really be getting more gossip-magazine attention, in my opinion, is decades-long love, worn by time and seasoned like a cast-iron skillet.
One example of this kind of cast-iron love, i.e. the type you could cook a really good steak on (am I belaboring this metaphor?), is the relationship between actress Michelle Yeoh and her partner of nearly two decades, former Ferrari head Jean Todt, who finally got married in Switzerland this past weekend, a full 19 years after Todt first proposed.
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A long engagement can be romantic, but a two-decades-long one might make you anxious if you’ve got Virgo placement anywhere in your birth chart (trust me, as the partner of a Virgo, they like things done promptly!). As an inherently lazy Cancer, though, I’m kind of obsessed with the idea of getting engaged and just not doing anything about it for many, many years. What if people—and women, in particular—were more or less left alone about the ways in which they choose to celebrate (or not celebrate) the relationships in their life, and actually got to execute big-ticket life events like getting married on their own timelines?
“Ladies, don’t let anybody tell you you’re ever past your prime,” Yeoh told the world while accepting her best-actress Oscar earlier this year, and it seems those immortal words also applied to her relationship. She’s never looked more beautiful than she does in the low-key wedding photos she posted to Instagram, which makes me wonder if there’s actually some kind of secret beauty benefit to not immediately jamming a diamond ring onto your fourth finger. “A piece of paper doesn’t change it for me, but it means a lot to Jean, so it means a lot to me,” Yeoh revealed of her attitude toward marriage in a 2022 Los Angeles Times interview; the 60-year-old star has been married once before, so it’s reasonable to assume that she knows what she’s doing when it comes to putting off a wedding for years. But I also think it’s insanely sweet that she ultimately folded to make her now-husband happy. We love a Groomzilla!
