How they make it work! Kristen Bell opened up about how her husband, Dax Shepard, keeps her on her toes after nearly 10 years of marriage.
“My husband keeps my mind and heart open and moving forward every single day, because he’s a challenger,” the Veronica Mars alum, 42, told Real Simple in a Thursday, February 9, interview when asked to name a “game changer” in her life. “We disagree about 99 percent of the things on earth, which is just fun and interesting.”
The Bad Moms star went on to say that Shepard, 48, helped her learn how to accept her flaws “by dropping the pretense of being perfect.” When the duo met, the “Armchair Expert” podcast host had recently decided to get sober. (Bell and the Parenthood alum tied the knot in 2013 after six years of dating.)
“He’d just recently started to be in recovery,” she explained. “I was a goody-goody with a temper. He was vulnerable and communicative. That scrambled my brain, because I was like, ‘I’m the one who does things right, OK?’ And he was like, ‘But you don’t, because you’re scared to say what you really feel.’ It was hard for me to say when something scared me. I realized that when I talked more about my fears, I gained more respect from not just my husband but everyone in my life.”
The couple — who share daughters Lincoln, 9, and Delta, 8 — have been open over the years about how Shepard’s addiction battle has affected their relationship. “All the things I’d done were terrifying to her, and she had a hard time believing I would ever be able to stay married and monogamous and a father and all those things,” the Punk’d alum told Playboy in 2012. “For the first year and a half [that] we were together, that was what we battled over almost weekly.”
In 2020, Shepard revealed that he relapsed after 16 years of sobriety, in part because of a motorcycle accident that resulted in him being prescribed Vicodin for pain. “I’ve had a lot of friends that I’ve watched go through this whole cycle, and I finally have the humility to say I will not be any different,” he said during a September 2020 episode of his podcast, adding that he’d initially kept his relapse secret from Bell. “I won’t be special. I won’t be smarter. I will be exactly like everyone else.”
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The Michigan native admitted that he’d been high at a celebration marking his sobriety anniversary, calling it “the worst hour my life.” Shepard noted that he was seven days clean when he recorded the episode.
Shortly after the podcast’s debut, an insider exclusively told Us Weekly that Bell was “nothing but supportive” of her husband. “Dax chose to keep this a secret from Kristen because he felt so ashamed at the time and didn’t want to hurt her,” the source explained. “They have such a strong marriage and have always been there for each other through thick and through thin.”
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