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’ll be the first to admit that when I claim to want what a particular couple has—the raison d’être of this column—what I actually mean a lot of the time is that I’m obsessed with one of its constituents. (The other person is…also there.) Today’s installment, however, couldn’t be more different: my broken-brained bisexual heart is drawn to the pairing of Aidy Bryant and Conner O’Malley both because of their admirably low-key romance and because I am totally in love with both of them.
O’Malley, an actor on shows including Broad City and I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson as well as a thrice WGA Award-nominated writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, met former Saturday Night Live and Shrill star Bryant in 2008. The couple got engaged in 2016 (with O’Malley dressing their dog up in a bow tie for the occasion) and married in 2018.
Much has been made recently of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s lack of a “swag gap” (unusual for a heterosexual couple, in which someone—usually the woman—is generally outmugging the other). But I would like to submit Bryant and O’Malley as another example of a couple perfectly matched. Both have brought me to tears of laughter with their comedy—Bryant with her “Dyke & Fats” SNL sketch and O’Malley with his Stand Up Solutions special. I can only imagine what it’s like to be in the presence of both of them at once—and in fact I hope that it never happens to me, because I would get really weird and parasocial really quickly and probably alienate them both.
One of the coolest things about Bryant and O’Malley only revealed itself to me as I was googling photos of them together for the very story you’re reading. As it turns out, there are no photos of them together—at least not on Getty—despite the fact they’ve been married for almost a decade. In this era of online overexposure, there’s something kind of amazing about that. I don’t know if these two have shared comedic projects in the offing or if they prefer to keep their work lives separate, but…why don’t they have a loosely scripted prestige streaming sitcom yet?