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Felicity Huffman was so terrified of commitment that she and William H. Macy dated off and on for 15 years before she took his proposals seriously.
"I was so scared of marriage that I thought I would've preferred to step in front of a bus," she told Tribune News in 2015.
Huffman, 56, and Macy, 68, met in the early 1980s at New York City's Atlantic Theater Company. For her, it was love at first sight.
The pair bonded over their love of acting—"It's the only language that we have," Macy told Closer Weekly—but as Huffman recalls, she had to talk him into dating.
"I went on a campaign. He was certainly worth it," she told Daily Mail.
They became a couple but took things slowly. Macy asked Huffman to marry him several times over the years, but the actress, whose own parents divorced when she was a baby, was reluctant. She worried that she'd lose her identity in marriage. "I thought I'd disappear. Men's stock when they get married goes up. Women's stock goes down," she has said.
After a breakup that lasted nearly five years, followed by yet another proposal, Huffman knew she couldn't say no. "I was finally smart enough to go: 'I'm going to marry this guy or really lose him for good,'" she explained.
"It was the work I had to do in order to bring myself to the marriage and then the work that I did to be able to trust another person and see what comes out of that comfort and that safety," Huffman continued. "I was able to blossom out of that."
The pair tied the knot on Sept. 6, 1997 and had their first child, daughter Sophia Grace, three years later. In 2002, they welcomed their second daughter, Georgia Grace.
As their relationship has blossomed over their years, so have their careers—definitely no coincidence. The two are each other's professional support network, reading scripts together and occasionally working together on various TV and film projects.
"I love to act with Bill," Huffman gushed to Closer Weekly earlier this year. "You know how if you play a sport with someone who is better than you, your game will improve? It's true with acting as well."
In 2009, they became the second couple to receive Hollywood Walk of Fame stars on the same day. (The first was producers Richard Donner and Lauren Shuler Donner in 2008.)
When they found out they were both nominated for Emmys in 2016, each told the other they weren't going to win. "Then we gave each other a kiss!" Huffman revealed with a laugh. (For the record, they were both right.)
Their work lives are so wrapped up in their personal lives, in fact, the pair used to have a rule: no talking shop in bed. "There were a lot of times where he'd go, 'I have an idea for that,' and I'd go, 'Hang on!' And we'd get out of bed and we'd talk about it," Huffman told HuffPo. "Now it's fine. Now we're too old to get out of bed."
What else do the quirky couple, who are no strangers to horseplay and PDA on the red carpet, do to keep the romance alive?
"Sometimes we go away. We find a hotel, and we just get away for a weekend," Macy told Closer Weekly.
They prioritize time together in smaller ways too. "Once a week we do sit down and make sure we take half an hour...just to talk, with no crosstalk," Huffman told HuffPo. "I talk, then you talk. You kind of just deeply check in with the other person. When you have 15 minutes to talk...you kind of actually see what's going on with the other person without any talk-back."
Huffman has said she loves to "do anything" with her husband; some of their favorite shared pastimes include running, reading, and eating at the Los Angeles restaurant Pizzeria Mozza on date nights.
And, just to assure the rest of us that they are a normal married couple, Huffman shared a few of the ways they get on each other's nerves during a 2015 interview with Ellen DeGeneres: She has a bad habit of leaving the lids off of containers, and he sometimes leaves the house with her car keys in his pocket. "I'm like, 'What? I guess we're all taking an Uber to school,'" Huffman joked.
These days, Huffman says marrying "Bill" (as she calls Macy) is the best thing she ever did, and even credits him for her ageless good looks. When asked about her personal fountain of youth, Huffman told Entertainment Tonight, "I don't know, probably being married to William H. Macy!"
The couple celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary on September 6, 2017, and Huffman took to Instagram with a sweet post, writing: "You took me home in 1985. You married me in 1997. You give me a thrill every time you walk through the door. Thank you for marrying me 20 years ago today."
Macy marked the milestone with a note of his own on Twitter: "Twenty years ago today I did the best thing I've ever done in my life. I married Felicity Huffman."
