Blake Lively Just Revealed the ‘Rule’ She Made With Ryan Reynolds When They First Started Dating

Blake Lively may have just revealed the secret behind her successful marriage to Ryan Reynolds—and it dates all the way back to the beginning of their relationship.

During a recent appearance on her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants co-star Amber Tamblyn’s Substack series Further Ado, Lively explained that she and Reynolds created a “rule” to make sure they never got too busy to spend time together. “When Ryan and I got together, we made a rule not to work at the same time,” Lively said, per Entertainment Tonight. “So that we could always prioritize our personal life.”

Lively and Reynolds met on the set of The Green Lantern in 2010, though they were both in other relationships at the time. The pair eventually got together sometime in 2011 following Lively’s own split from Gossip Girl co-star Penn Badgley in September 2010 and the Deadpool star’s divorce from Scarlett Johansson in December of that same year.

At the time, Blake Lively was still starring in the popular teen drama while Ryan Reynolds’ career had been thriving following a series of rom-coms, com-coms, and action movies, so this wasn’t a simple commitment to make. “That takes working really hard when we’re not,” Lively told Tamblyn. “Just like financial planning and sustaining that—it takes balance.”

13 years and four daughters later, this rule seems to be working out for them. “We don’t split up,” Reynolds told Access Hollywood in 2020. “Like, I shoot movies and my wife shoots movies and we go travel all over the place, and we just all go together. I think that’s been the best part of it is that we really don’t spend a lot of time apart. I get to spend a lot of time with my girls.”