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 love when queer people find each other, whether it’s onscreen or in real life—so the platonic ideal of that situation for me is two queer people who dated on television going on to date IRL. Obviously, I’m talking about Grey’s Anatomy stars E.R. Fightmaster and Caterina Scorsone, who appeared to confirm their relationship this week, several years after their Grey’s characters engaged in a brief but memorable fling on the show. (I guess this is the part where I come clean about the fact that I have, technically, met Fightmaster once at the Altadena Seed Library; if memory serves, they offered to help me haul my bags of topsoil up a flight of stairs and were generally extremely nice. Now that I’ve gotten that juicy celebrity confession off my chest, onward!)
In fact, Fightmaster and Scorsone’s relationship has been something of an open secret in the Los Angeles LGBTQ+ community for years, and to be fair, they still haven’t publicly said they’re together, but recent pictures of the two of them walking hand-in-hand out of LA’s Highly Likely café seem conclusive enough. (And, honestly, highly likely—heh—place for them to be, given that I have never so much as popped in there to grab a coffee without running into at least one woman or nonbinary person I’ve been on a Hinge date with.)
While Fightmaster and Scorsone’s Grey’s characters weren’t exactly bound for true love—as Fightmaster’s Kai noted before leaving Seattle for a new job, Scorsone’s Amelia really did make everything about herself—it’s nice to see just how much the two actors admire one another offscreen. “I bring her with me to a lot of stuff and she brings me along to a lot of stuff,” Fightmaster said of Scorsone in a 2023 interview, going on to describe their outings to WNBA events and experience volunteering together at a high school (yes, a full three years before this week’s confirmation of their coupledom).
The fact that Fightmaster—who, in addition to their acting career, performs as a musician under their last name—and Scorsone, who shares three children with her ex-husband, Rob Giles, are finally going somewhat public with their relationship is a good reminder that the best (or best-seeming, anyway…I don’t know these people, despite my topsoil meet-cute with Fightmaster!) relationships are often born of a slow-burn friendship. And anyway, E.R., when you find a girlfriend who casually quotes Wittgenstein in defense of gender-inclusive terminology, hold onto her with everything you’ve got!