Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’s Relationship: A Complete Timeline

If there’s a real-life Barbie and Ken, it’s Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. Super successful, incredibly gorgeous, and most incredibly…apparently really nice? Unlike the coldly aspirational A-list couples (Brangelina, Bey and Jay, Will and Jada), Blake and Ryan (Bryan?) fall into the category of couples you’d love to have over for a dinner party, like Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, or Kurt and Goldie. Plus, they troll each other on social media harder than the Beckhams do and have a brood to match: four kids and, we assume, some pets. They seem like pets people, don’t they?

Hard to believe, the couple have been married since 2012. It’s hard to picture a time they weren’t together! But remember when Serena was IRL dating Dan? And Ryan Reynolds was married to ScarJo? Yup. That was after his Alanis relationship.

Since hopefully their union will last to infinity and beyond, let’s take a look at how they got to where they are, through every major step in their relationship timeline. Warning: cuteness ahead.

July 2010: Lively and Reynolds appeared together at ComicCon to promote their film, Green Lantern. They weren’t yet a couple, though: He was married to Scarlett Johansson, and she was dating her Gossip Girl costar Penn Badgley. The movie would come out the following June and be a flop, but it’ll always have a special place in our hearts because it brought these two together.

September 2010: Lively and Badgley called it quits. “They’re still good friends and hang out on the set,” a source told Us Weekly at the time.

December 2010: Reynolds filed for divorce from Johansson.

October 2011: Dating rumors began after Lively was spotted leaving Reynolds’s Boston apartment with the actor early in the morning.

December 2011: Paparazzi caught the new couple holding hands in Vancouver while visiting Reynolds’s family during the holidays.

September 2012: On September 10, Lively and Reynolds pulled off their secret ceremony at the Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina. (Uhhhh, yeah. Plantation wedding. Not the best—which they have acknowledged.) People reported that Florence Welch, of Florence and the Machine, performed at the reception. “Ryan and Blake wanted the event to look and feel like home,” wedding planner Tara Guerard said. “We created the charm, elegance, and magic of times past. It was a truly beautiful celebration.” The bride wore Marchesa, while the groom chose Burberry.

“When Ryan first saw her, his face broke into a huge smile that crinkled his eyes,” a source said. “They just stared at each other with absolute love. Their faces were lit up with the candlelight, and it looked like something out of a romance movie.”

September 2013: Lively opened up about married life to Lucky magazine. “I was recently asked how my style has changed since I got married, as if I was living under some sort of dictatorship,” she said. “I should hope I dress differently at 25 than I did when I graduated high school. I hope I never stop changing.”

She also said of her husband, “I’m very lucky to be with someone who has better taste than me. We influence each other in different ways. With film and TV, you don’t see the results for months. Building a home, you get immediate gratification.”

August 2014: In an interview with Vogue, Lively gushed about her partnership with the Deadpool actor. “Everything we do in life, we do together,” she said. “I get to share my life with the person he’s become, and we get to grow from there.”

September 2014: For the first time, Lively mentioned the idea of having kids with Reynolds. “He’s my best, best friend. What do you do with your best friend? You do nothing. If I could spit out a litter of kids, I would,” she told Marie Claire.

October 2014: Sure enough, just one month later, Lively announced her pregnancy with the couple’s first child on her now defunct lifestyle website, Preserve.

January 2015: Daughter James arrived. “The baby came early but everyone is happy and healthy,” a source told Us Weekly. “The Bedford house is all prepared. They’re going to stay up there for the baby’s first days.”

March 2015: Reynolds finally revealed the name of his daughter. “It’s James. Everyone knows,” he told the Today show. “I didn’t want to be the first guy screaming it out to the media, because as we know, little girls turn into teenage girls and little teenage girls sometimes scan through the archives and go, ‘Why did you do that?’”

May 2015: Reynolds shared the first photo of baby James’s…hand.

“Thumb wrestling isn’t always fair,” he captioned the photo. “Curiously, my hand is the small one.”

February 2016: Reynolds opened up about their first date for Entertainment Weekly. “We were buddies then. 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,” he recalled. “We went on a double date. She was on a date with another guy, and I was on a date with another girl. That was the most awkward date [from their perspective] probably because we were just like fireworks coming across.”

April 2016: Baby No. 2 was on the way, Us Weekly reported after the actress was photographed sporting a baby bump in a fitted wetsuit on the set of The Shallows.

July 2016: Lively talked about the couple’s close relationship with Marie Claire. “I knew he would always be my best friend for my whole life,” she said. “That was the biggest thing to me. I’d never known anything like the friendship that I had with him. I could like him as much as I loved him.”

September 2016: The couple’s second daughter, Inez, was born.

November 2016: Ryan Reynolds revealed how he knew wife Blake Lively was “the one.”

“No, we were hanging out at this little restaurant in Tribeca that’s open really late, and this song came on and I was just like, ‘Want to dance?’” he told British GQ. “No one was in there, so it was just totally empty. And it was just one of those moments where halfway through the dance, it was like, ‘Oh, I think I just crossed a line.’

“And then I walked her home. And, uh, you know, I don’t really need to go into what happened after that.”

December 2016: Though Lively and Reynolds keep their kids’ lives pretty private, both of their daughters made a rare public appearance when Reynolds got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “Proud is a pitiful word to describe how I felt today,” Lively wrote on Instagram at the time. “@vancityreynolds The permanence of your impact is undeniable …Always has been, but now we have a fancy [star] to show for it.”

October 2017: Lively talked with People about what makes their marriage work. “My husband and I don’t work at the same time, so we all go together as a family,” she said. “If we’re away as a family, it’s never more than for a day. We stay together.”

February 2018: Another way Reynolds and Lively keep their relationship fresh is their constant (and hilarious) online trolling of each other. Like when he posted a pic of the Valentine’s Day cake he made—with glue as the icing.

May 2018: They even use the trolling to promote their projects, like Lively’s movie A Simple Favor.

May 2019: On May 2, the couple announced they were expecting their third child on the red carpet for the Detective Pikachu premiere.

August 2019: Reynolds got back to his trolling ways in honor of his wife’s 32nd birthday—and in the process gives the world some new pregnancy photos.

October 2019: The world learns Lively had given birth to the couple’s third child, but it reportedly happened two months prior and they’d kept it a secret from the public. Though Reynolds revealed on Twitter that he and Lively had welcomed another daughter, they didn’t share her name at the time.

“I love B.C. 🇨🇦 I want my daughters to experience the same natural playground I grew up in. On Oct. 21, the candidate you vote for will SHAPE CLIMATE POLICY. I’m proud of the climate progress made the last 4 years. Click http://Elections.ca for voting info. #Capilano,” he wrote.

July 2020: Fans speculated that Taylor Swift revealed the name of their third daughter with her song “Betty.” Both “James” and “Inez” were the other characters in the song, so it was a natural conclusion. 

November 2020: Reynolds shared the secret to raising three daughters with Lively. “We don’t split up,” he said in an Access Hollywood interview. “I shoot movies and my wife shoots movies and we go travel all over the place and we just all go together. I think that’s been the best part of it is that we really don’t spend a lot of time apart. I get to spend a lot of time with my girls.”

He also revealed he “never in a million years would have imagined” raising all girls. “I come from all boys. I have three older brothers. I’m the youngest of four boys, so for me to have three daughters has been such a ride,” he said. “I love every second of it.”

February 2021: Blake Lively let husband Ryan Reynolds dye her hair during quarantine. Wow remember those days?

April 2021: The couple gave fans a rare look into one of their date nights. On April 30, they ventured out to a Yankees game and clearly had a blast together. Lively referred to the date as the start of “Mom&Dad Girl Summer.”

Reynolds also shared a sweet selfie from the evening to his feed. 

November 2021: Reynolds shared the secret that’s made his nine-year marriage to Lively so wonderful. “We don’t take each other too seriously, but we’re also friends,” he told ET Online. “Falling in love is great, but do you like each other? That’s kinda the question you gotta ask yourself, you know, going into it. We’ve always liked each other. We grow together. We learn from each other. So yeah, I’m lucky to have a buddy in that.”

February 2022: For their ninth Valentine's Day as a married couple, Lively shared a sweet selfie of the pair on his Instagram, writing: “Find me a better friend. ♥️ I’ll wait…” So true bestie. 

March 2022: Lively, a Met Gala queen, and her husband were chosen as cochairs for the 2022 Met gala alongside Regina King and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Will anything top her 2018 Versace dress on the carpet, though? Probably not. 

May 2022: Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds walked the Met Gala 2022 red carpet together as cochairs of the annual event. They embraced the “Gilded Glamour” thing in style, wouldn’t you say?

September 2022: Lively revealed that she and Reynolds were expecting a fourth child by showing up with her bump at a Forbes Power Women’s Summit on September 15, 2022. 

February 2023: Baby 4 arrives! The Gossip Girl alum, in her typically say-much-while-saying-nothing manner, didn’t so much announce the birth as casually reveal her fetus-less body, uploading a picture from the “puppy bowl” (on Super Bowl Sunday) in which she doesn’t seem to be pregnant.

April 2023: Ryan opened up about their long-standing plans to have a big family, saying, “You know, two to three was a huge jump…three to four less so…. I cannot speak for my wife, but it’s just from what I’ve observed. But we love it. You know, we would be idiots to do this again if we didn’t love it.” He noted that they are both from larger families, adding, “I come from four; Blake comes from five…. Both of us are the youngest.”

May 1, 2023: Though she is known for her gorgeous looks that somehow always match the carpet, Lively skipped this year’s Met Gala, instead spending the night pumping breastmilk in a bathroom, as she shared with followers. Later that month, she once again thirsted over her husband on main.

May 17, 2023: While promoting Wrexham AFC, the Welsh soccer club that Reynolds co-owns with actor Rob McElhenney, the actor opened up about his dynamic with the players. Specifically Ollie Palmer, a striker who had a tendency to exit the locker room shirtless whenever Lively was in Wales with her husband.

“Every time we’ve come as a family and stuff, we’ll walk down to the locker room, and Ollie’s the first guy that walks out of that dressing room completely shirtless to have a conversation with my wife,” Reynolds said on the Fearless Devotion podcast. “I’m always like, ‘Ollie, put a fucking shirt on and come back out like a gentleman,’” he joked.