COVID can’t stop love. Jenny Slate revealed she and fiancé Ben Shattuck tied the knot in a private ceremony held at their home, after postponing the event three times due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“We were planning on a [wedding] that ended up being almost 200 people, and then now, it’s just our parents and siblings,” the Saturday Night Live alum told Marie Claire in the new issue, which was published on Tuesday, January 18. “We each invited six friends … I actually like it. I like it better. I didn’t realize how the large thing was making me feel uncomfortable, a little bit. Just a little.”
After making their debut as a couple at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2019, Shattuck proposed to Slate in September of that year. “He took me to France and made a picnic and made me feel happy and free and then he asked me to marry him and i screamed YES,” the comedian wrote on Instagram in September 2019.
“I love you @benshattuck_art,” Slate continued. “You are the kindest and brightest and I am so grateful and here we go and keep going.”
The couple welcomed their first child, a baby girl named Ida Lupine, in February 2021. At the time, Slate told Entertainment Tonight that “motherhood is for sure the most meaningful thing that has ever happened to me.” The actress echoed those sentiments in her interview with Marie Claire.
“I only realized this after I had the baby, but I thought being a mother would be like a replica of my own mother’s experience with motherhood,” she said, reflecting on her own childhood. “At least, how I perceived it: in which she really, really, really loves us so much, and also, she often seemed really stressed out, and at loose ends, and at her wits’ end, and exhausted, and splattered in clay.”
However, Slate said she’s had the “opposite” experience when it comes to raising her daughter. “Not at all that it’s not difficult and challenging to have a newborn baby. There are so many profound challenges, but I’ve never been happier in my life. I feel like I can finally be what I want to be,” she explained.
Slate previously dated Chris Evans, and the couple split in 2017 after less than a year of dating. The Bob’s Burgers‘ star was married to film editor Dean Fleischer-Camp from 2012 until 2016. Us Weekly confirmed the separation in May 2016, with a source telling Us that “it wasn’t a bad breakup.”