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.
To be honest, when I say that a celebrity couple “seems so relatable,” most of the time I’m grading on a Los Angeles curve. Basically, if the energy a famous pair is giving is anything short of murderous, I’m capable of convincing myself that they’re a) extremely normal and b) would probably be my best friends if they happened to live next door to me in my medium-sad East Hollywood apartment complex.
All that said, I have to posit that Get Out and Us director Jordan Peele and his wife, comedian and Brooklyn 99 star Chelsea Peretti, might actually be that rare thing in “the industry”: a genuinely cool couple. I mostly think this because they met on X, as my partner and I did (back when it was still Twitter, and not a malevolent billionaire’s cursed playground); they’ve been Instagram-official for the last decade, which, in our modern era, is basically the equivalent of a 60-year-long marriage; and they eloped in 2016. “I know this is just a perfect situation because every day it gets better,” Peretti said of her marriage to Peele at the time, and I…cry! They had one witness at their Big Sur nuptuals, and it was their dog!
Peele and Peretti had their first child in 2017, and I have to imagine (as a former nanny) that they’re also extremely chill to babysit for. I deeply appreciate their online banter, especially since sometimes, when celebrities who are in love interact online or IRL, it feels like their lines were written by ChatGPT. Peele and Peretti are two distinctly, uproariously funny people, so it stands to reason that they’re non-corny as a couple, but I, for one, am still deeply glad to see it. After all, how disappointing would it be if either of them settled for someone less funny?
Peele is the writer and director behind one of the most chilling portraits of a relationship from the last decade (yes, I’m talking about Get Out), which you could imagine making things slightly weird on the home front. But, naturally, Peretti had the perfect response when, in 2017, someone on X wondered whether the interracial relationship featured in the film was at all inspired by hers and Peele’s. “We all cried for weeks, we were so hurt to see our family secrets exposed in this documentary,” Peretti replied. Granted, Peretti does have a brother who, uh, arguably sucks, but overall, I truly believe that her marriage to Peele is closer to a zany Brooklyn 99 episode than a horror film (even a critically acclaimed one, like the kind Peele makes).