Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher didn’t start out planning a marriage. They started with a handshake and a pact to keep things casual—a plan that, by her own admission, ran directly counter to the lessons of the movies each had just made.
Kunis explained the irony on The Howard Stern Show in 2016: when she and Kutcher reconnected, they made a handshake pact to keep things casual, even though each had recently starred in a movie about why that exact arrangement never works.
Kutcher starred opposite Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached, released in January 2011. Six months later, Kunis starred opposite Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits. The movies had essentially the same premise and reached the same conclusion.
“If we just paid attention to these movies, we should know that shit like this does not work out in real life,” Kunis said. “We literally just had a very open conversation.”
“We shook hands. We were like, ‘Let’s just have fun,’” she said.
They had reconnected in early 2012, when both were newly single and Kunis spotted Kutcher from behind at the Golden Globes. “It was literally like, if we were in a movie, the music would start playing and the violins would go,” she said.
Kutcher invited her to a housewarming party, where she ended up staying the night—the first time she had ever slept over at a man’s house while single. When she tried to call an Uber around 2 a.m., he told her she was crazy to leave and persuaded her to stay.
About three months into their casual arrangement, Kunis realized she had real feelings for him. She told Kutcher she was going to walk away before things became messy. The next day, he showed up at her house and asked her to move in. They married in July 2015 and have two children.
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