Dax Shepard was against marriage until a Christmas Eve night with his now-wife, Kristen Bell, changed his mind.
“You told me you didn’t believe in marriage,” Bell, 46, recalled to Shepard, 51, on the Monday, October 26, episode of his “Armchair Expert” podcast. “You told me why. I didn’t think there would ever be an answer because I was like, ‘I kind of like that tradition.’”
Bell then recalled Shepard telling her, “A piece of paper filed at a courthouse somewhere in California is not going to dictate how I treat you. It’s just not, and so I’m going to treat you well and act like your partner for the rest of your life. But it has nothing to do with that piece of paper.”
Shepard added that he had an “anarchist point of view” at the time.
“I don’t have to ask the state of California if we can be together, and then ask them if we cannot be together,” he said, referring to marriage and divorce.
The Zathura actor also pointed out that both he and Bell are “children of multiple divorces.”
Bell said she accepted the idea of not officially marrying Shepard because he treated her like his wife already. However, Shepard’s perspective changed when Bell flew to Detroit to pick up his parents and then flew back to California so they could all celebrate Christmas Eve together.
“We had this beautiful Christmas Eve with my family,” he recalled. “We were in bed that night, and you were kind of expressing gratitude for this little family we were making. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is the moment I’m going to try to recreate in a month at Stanley’s over a salad, but it’s happening.’ I was like, ‘F*** it, I’m just gonna go get the ring now.’”
Shepard then recalled going to their bedroom closet and rummaging in a jacket pocket to find the engagement ring he had purchased. Bell had a feeling that a marriage proposal was about to happen.
“She’s already crying by the time I got back to the bed,” the podcaster said.
“He got down on one knee, and he said, ‘Will you marry me?’ And then I started sobbing really, really hard because that was very overwhelming of something I didn’t think was coming,” Bell added.
Bell and Shepard, who began dating in 2007, announced their engagement in 2010. The pair then welcomed daughter Lincoln in March 2013, seven months before they tied the knot at the Beverly Hills County Clerk’s Office. The couple welcomed their second daughter, Delta, in December 2014.
Earlier this month, Bell made headlines for her candid confession about being a working mom.
“It’s hard,” Bell told Bustle. “Do not think because I am on your television that it is easy for me. It’s brutal. I cry weekly.”
She also opened up about struggling to maintain the balance of openness about her and Shepard’s parenting journey and protecting her kids’ privacy.
“For the good of the people, we should share our dirty stories, we should share our shame, we should share our hardships,” the Nobody Wants This star told the outlet. “But for the good of the one? My main job in life is to protect those two.”
She continued, “I guess a conclusion we came to at a time in our parenting journey is, like, we can share all the cute things when they’re little, but when they could possibly be exposed to [media] or possibly have a feeling in response to it … well, now, the equation has changed. There’s someone else in the mix, and you have to have enough self-awareness and consideration to consider that person. And that person is my daughter, so she’s No. 1.”
