Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell are often quick to fight off speculation that they're Hollywood's best couple. While they've created a family together, and they seem to have fun with each other, they're quick to admit that there can be tension. In fact, they've admitted multiple times that their relationship requires a lot of work. Since most healthy relationships do, it's a breath of fresh air to hear that they're not afraid to get real.
That means that they're also not afraid to talk about their fights. On the first episode of Dax's podcast, Armchair Expert, he interviewed Kristen — and admitted the two had been a little salty with each other before recording. But it was on the Life Is Short With Justin Long podcast where Kristen admitted that, once, the couple didn't talk to each other for three full days.
She describes the two of them as being "really good fighters," which can come with its own set of struggles. But the good news is that it seems like Kristen can laugh about the ordeal now. Here's what happened.
"We had this pretty incredible fight recently. Incredible. I mean, like, top of the lungs screaming," she said. "It was about things around the house that I felt I needed help with, and we have a relationship where you are supposed to be able to say, 'I need your help with this.'" Sound familiar? There's a chance you had this same exact fight with your spouse or significant other.
Women who are partnered with men can struggle with being expected to handle the emotional load. A lot of the time, a woman might expect her male partner to see a problem and fix it. Having to tell them to take out the trash every day may not seem like a lot of work to them, but it can make anyone feel like they're talking to an empty room if it happens over and over. It can make you feel like you're not being respected.
She was quick to describe what needed to be done — and it sounds reasonable. "I left at 10 a.m. I wasn't going to be back until 2:30. That's a nice chunk of your Sunday you have off, right? I left a note and I was like, 'Hey, Dad! Would you mind taking the two towels in the dryer and folding them,' and then, like, one other thing," she said. The pair have two daughters — Delta and Lincoln — so housework can quickly pile up.
Unfortunately, the plan didn't go the way Kristen had hoped. "I thought, 'That's 10 minutes of work. I can say that.' At that point the house was getting to be a lot for me. Just keeping up with all the mom stuff," she said. But it wasn't the housework that bothered Dax. It was the note itself.
When she got home, they talked about it more."We're laying in bed and he turns over and, like a puppy can sense it when you're about to get angry, I can sense it in him two seconds before it happens. And he goes, 'When you leave me notes, yeah, I feel really controlled.' And he launched into how he felt about it," Kristen said.
"I said to myself immediately, 'Don't react. Don't react. Don't react.' And I said, 'OK. I totally hear you. It will never happen again. If I need something to be done around the house, what's a way that I could do it that you'd be OK with hearing? What's a better way I could do it?'" It seems like a reasonable request, but it set both of them off.
The escalation is something we've all suffered before. But Kristen can barely even remember the words that were said. "I don’t actually remember what happened, but what transpired was a lot of volume, a lot of harsh words being thrown around, and it was an angry, angry fight about how nobody does anything for anybody else," she admitted. "I grabbed my pillow and I stomped down the hall and I sleep in the front room and I’m crying, right?"
The only times they talked in those three days were for matters involving their daughters. But then, one day, Kristen asked Dax for a request — she was hanging out with shelter dogs, and she wanted permission to bring one home. Dax, who actually has a dog allergy, agreed to her request. From that point on, they were back to their old selves.
"I didn’t get an apology, but I got a dog!" Kristen said. "This is so much better than an apology!" She admitted that the two never sat down to talk about what happened, but that things were a lot better now. "Every single thing that I have needed done or thought, 'I’d want help with this,' since that fight, he has been ahead of," she admitted. "I couldn’t complain about him if I tried right now."
But that doesn't mean that all of their problems will be solved for good. Marriage has a lot of ups and downs, and Kristen is well aware that the two will probably fight again. And it may make headlines. "We talk about the fact that we do fight, we do go to therapy, we dislike each other a lot sometimes," she admitted.
If you watch their Samsung commercials, you might not even be able to picture the two of them duking it out. They've got a ton of chemistry, which is one of the reasons why their relationship works. Funny enough, Kristen has admitted before that it wasn't necessarily love at first sight when they met.
"I didn’t know who he was," she told Today. "I was like, maybe one of the guys from ‘Jackass’ or something? … and then we left. There were no sparks whatsoever. None." But upon further interactions, things started to change. "He’s so bold and that was my kind of person," she said.
They started dating in 2007 and waited a few years to get married. They didn't have an all-out bash, like many celebrities. Instead, they wed at a courthouse in 2013. Supposedly the wedding cost the couple only $142, serving as a reminder that weddings don't need to be fancy or special — they just need to include someone you really love.
Kristen told USA Today that, for many women, their perception of love and romance can be skewed due to the media. "All these movies from the ’80s taught us that it’s love at first sight, and it is supposed to be easy and (that) all you have to do is find that person," she said. "It took me a while to realize, ‘Oh, that was such a lie,’ because things that you work really, really, really hard for always yield the best results." Without a doubt, Dax and Kristen are working hard to keep their relationship steady.
