Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we examine the celebrity couples who give us hope for our own romantic futures as we try to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
I was watching an old episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm last night (as in-demand It Girls often do), and when I heard frequent guest star Ted Danson tell Larry David that he and his wife—the actress Mary Steenburgen, who also often appears on the show—were separated and headed for divorce, I cannot tell you how hard I sweated. You would think my parents were telling me they were splitting up (again!).
Distressed, I rushed to Google to fact-check and quickly learned that this was the definition of “a joke”; indeed, Danson and Steenburgen are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year. Later seeing the couple hand-in-hand at the 2025 Emmys was the highlight of my Sunday evening.
Danson and Steenburgen are known in Hollywood-insider circles (okay, fine, Reddit) for being the kind of committed activists who don’t constantly talk about themselves, which makes it particularly fitting that the Television Academy presented them with the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award on Sunday for their decades’ worth of work with organizations including Heifer International and the youth and family drug and alcohol prevention education center Angels at Risk.
Not to make light of Danson and Steenburgen’s genuinely incredible work—they actually founded Angels at Risk—but as they stood onstage at the Peacock Theater to accept their award, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of deal with the devil and/or Dr. Levine the two had made to look so phenomenally good in their 70s. (No shade intended whatsoever; if the couple has gotten work done, it’s of absolutely sublime and subtle quality.) I mean, these two aren’t just the co-parents of two children and Lily Collins’s in-laws, they’re full-on grandparents! How dare they be more glowing and overflowing with collagen than I, a mere 32-year-old?
Luckily, there’s more than just age-defying good looks drawing Danson and Steenburgen together; They demonstrated as much to People last fall, when Danson raved about his favorite moments with Steenburgen: “The most fun is the early mornings, 4:30 in the morning, coffee in bed, playing Wordle, Connections, and Spelling Bee, talking and laughing and sharing. To both of us, it’s like heaven on Earth.” Okay, I do not want to rise while it’s still technically night out, but in every other respect, this is all I could possibly dream of for my own romantic future with my partner. We love a man who loves brain-teasers, and his beautiful wife, in equal measure!
