Some celebrity couples have made the news for their long-lasting marriages. Others have garnered a lot of attention because of their contentious divorces. Then there are also some celebrity couples who you might think are actually married since they've been together for so long.
For many people, marriage feels like the norm and the logical next step in a romantic relationship. But these celebrity couples have opted out of that tradition and have never tied the knot despite being together for a long time.
Maya Rudolph and Paul Thomas Anderson
You might not realize that filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is not Maya Rudolph's husband because she refers to him as that even though they're not actually married. They've been together since 2001 and they're parents to four children. Though they keep their relationship pretty private, actor and comedian Maya, 52, previously explained why she calls Paul her husband — calling him her boyfriend felt weird after they welcomed their first child together, she told The New York Times.
She likes calling him her husband because "people know what that means. It means he’s the father of my child, and I live with him, and we are a couple, and we are not going anywhere."
Vin Diesel and Paloma Jiménez
Vin Diesel prefers to keep his relationship out of the spotlight, to the point that he might very well be married — but it's unclear. Vin has been with his partner, model Paloma Jiménez, since 2007. They've welcomed three children.
In 2007, Vin told Details that when it comes to his romantic life, he's "not gonna put it out there on a magazine cover like some other actors."
In 2017, he gushed about his partner when speaking to Entertainment Tonight.
"She's so stunningly beautiful, but the thing people don't realize is she's my rock, so she's so stunningly beautiful on the inside," he said at the time. "She's just so wonderful in so many ways."
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Oprah Winfrey and Stedman Graham
Oprah Winfrey and Stedman Graham have been engaged before, but never got married — and Oprah has said that they would not be together today if they had actually tied the knot.
They've been together since 1986, but in a 2020 essay, Oprah explained why marriage wouldn't work for them.
"I realized I didn’t actually want a marriage. I wanted to be asked. I wanted to know he felt I was worthy of being his missus, but I didn’t want the sacrifices, the compromises, the day-in-day-out commitment required to make a marriage work," she wrote in 2020.
She thinks of what they have as a "spiritual partnership."
In 2017, Oprah explained to Vogue that Stedman's "interpretation of what it means to be a husband and what it would mean for me to be a wife would have been pretty traditional, and I would not have been able to fit into that.”
Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg
Wallace Shawn, 80, and Deborah Eisenberg, 78, have reportedly lived together for more than 40 years but never got married. In 2018, The New York Times reported that Deborah calls Wallace "my boyfriend" or "my sweetheart."
In a 2004 interview, Wallace told the outlet that he and Deborah were "having a love affair." "If I wanted my personal life to be public, I would be married. Marriage is public. That's what it means," he said at the time.
He then provided more details about why he wasn't interested in marriage: "I would say it is hard enough to make a plan for how you are going to spend an evening with somebody else. So to make a plan for how you are going to behave in 25 years seems based on a view of life that is incomprehensible to me."
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell have been together since 1983. They had both been married to other people before, which is part of the reason why they're not interested in getting married.
"Because we have been married and because when it doesn't work out it ends up to be a big business. Somebody has to own something. It's always ugly," Goldie said on CNN's Who's Talking to Chris Wallace? in 2023.
"Somebody has to actually take a look and say, 'How many divorces are fun? How many divorces actually don't cost money? How many divorces make you even hate the person more than you did before? How many divorces have hurt children?'" she continued.
