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.
It’s an exciting day for Barbie stans, film bros, and secret-celebrity-wedding enthusiasts alike: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach have tied the knot at New York City Hall after 12 years of dating, according to reports.
Obviously, as someone who wore pink for most of this summer out of allegiance to Barbiecore, this news thrills me. I’ve loved Gerwig and Baumbach as a couple ever since I came across that reaction meme of her cheering and him frowning at a basketball game (not to do a gender essentialism, but men are sooooooo not fun)—but what I didn’t realize was that the two had also crafted one of my most enduring concepts of love.
Allow me to backtrack: The 2012 film Frances Ha, directed by Baumbach and starring Gerwig as a neurotic, barely employed dancer, encompasses a whole lot of shiftless, 20-something Brooklyn angst (heard, chef), but it also happens to contain one of the most beautiful verbalizations of true love I’ve ever heard. (The couple co-wrote the script.) Toward the end of the film, Frances is drunk at a party and delivers the following monologue to her mostly unwilling audience:
It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it... but it’s a party... and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining... and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes... but—but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual... but because... that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s—that’s what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess.
Now, how could the two people who wrote those lines not be in love for real?
I don’t know much about Gerwig and Baumbach as a couple, partly because they’re rumored to be quite private and partly because Twitter—excuse me, X—is basically unusable now, and that’s where I used to collect the bulk of my celebrity gossip. Still, I can’t help falling for a couple so skilled at collaboration (not only on their work, but on the creation of two children). Although Barbie is pretty objectively Gerwig’s brainchild, the two did co-author the script, so there’s a chance they could be receiving husband-and-wife Oscars in a few months. And, hey, even if that doesn’t happen, Gerwig is still a little bit taller than Baumbach (at least while wearing heels in photographs, although the internet claims they’re both 5’9”), which is literally my favorite attribute that a straight couple can possess. Mazel tov to these two!
