Serious Question: Who Married Up? Ryan Reynolds or Blake Lively?
As a 23-year-old, you can bet I know a ton about marriage. I know so much, in fact, that I see it as part of my job to evaluate the merits of other people’s marriages. Some marriages are good, others are bad, and others defy definition and description. Those are the Marriage Evaluation Basics. Are you keeping up so far?
People marry up, down, and across. The prior two categories are equal in occurrence, because that’s how math works, and the final category is much rarer than each of the other two. When you marry up, it means you married someone out of your league. When you marry down, it means you married someone below your league. Marrying across means you married someone in your league. If you did the first one or the last one, congrats! If you did the middle one, thank you for your service to this country and we are fighting for your inclusion on the G.I. bill.
Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are great together. The two met on the set of Green Lantern in 2010, began dating in 2011, and were married in 2012. They’re fun and sweet and they laugh a lot around each other, one of the premiere signs of a happy and strong relationship. Many would describe Ryan and Blake as a “power couple,” which is apt, because their collective celebrity is indeed very powerful, but when you look at them together you can’t help but wonder: Who married up?
Answering that question is complicated. It takes a wide-range examination of who this man and who this woman were, are, and will be. Hold on, you say, it’s so simple. You just look and see who was a bigger deal at the time, then case closed. No, see, you’re forgetting how much I know about marriage. It’s more complicated than that. If we just looked at who was more famous at the point of marriage, then we’d just know which celebrity married a more famous celebrity. That’s not the question. We’re asking who married up. Marrying up is more than fame, it’s many factors. Here are some other things to consider:
- Family history: Call it old-fashioned, but there’s no denying that when you want to marry someone and they come from a bigger, more successful, or more storied family than you do, there’s a little bit of a disparate feeling.
- Physical Appeal: Call it superficial, but this is part of how we determine ‘leagues’ in the romantic sense. Think about high school—why was that hot girl or guy out of your league? Because they were hotter than you. And why were you out of that person’s league your junior year when you finally had your braces off and your hair looked fly as hell? Because you were hotter than them. This is how the world works.
- Prior Career Success: Simple—who was better at their job prior to the relationship?
- Future Ambition: Did one person continue their professional pursuits more aggressively or more successfully after the marriage?
- Prior Relationships: This is a nebulous thing, but it matters a tiny bit. If you overcame steeper competition to win the heart of your SO than your SO did to win you, you have a tiny edge. We’ll talk about this.
- Future Relationships: Just kidding.
In each category, we’ll compare Blake and Ryan to see who has the edge, then at the end we’ll take each of their results and see who married up. Time to begin answering the Serious Question.
Who Married Up: Ryan Reynolds or Blake Lively?
Family History
Ryan’s full name is Ryan Rodney Reynolds (amazing). His father James was a food wholesaler and his mother Tammy was in retail. Classic Irish Roman Catholic family from Canada (I think—I’m a marriage expert, not an Irish expert). Ryan also has four older brothers.
Blake Ellender Brown (that’s Lively’s given name—amazing) was born in Los Angeles to Ernie and Elaine, an actor and talent scout, respectively. She has four siblings, all of them in the entertainment industry, and she followed her parents to acting classes even as a little girl. In high school, Blake was class president at Burbank High—huge sign of likeability and popularity—where she was also a cheerleader and choir member.
This is pretty open and shut. On one side, a beautiful cheerleader from a high-rolling Hollywood family. On the other side, a scrappy blue-collar kid born to be a star but made to claw his way up. You might call them star-crossed lovers, but we’ll call it like it was: In terms of their early lives and backgrounds, Blake is way out of Ryan’s league.
Advantage: Blake
Physical Appeal
Hmm. Okay. This is a toughie. Both of these individuals are gorgeous people. Ryan Reynolds is 40 now—no, not a typo—and he’s the envy of every barely middle-aged guy out there. Blake Lively is 29—again, not a typo—and for someone who’s been through two kids and the no-doubt wack stuff she had to do for The Town, she couldn’t look better. But if we had to say one was more physically appealing, and thus in a higher league, the edge would have to go to Ryan.
Here’s why: Ryan Reynolds is the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of being attractive. He’s been at it a long time, but the consistency and sustainability of his statistics are still remarkably high. Even at 40, he is better-looking on his worst day than pretty much every other actor on their worst day. Catch Ryan all hot and sweaty after a (…) football game and he’s still gonna have that smirky hot-guy charm. Catch Ryan all splattered and shirtless after a (…) mud wrestling competition and he’s gonna still have a superhero physique. Catch Ryan all panting and out of breath after a (…) middle-of-the-night run to the bathroom and he’s still gonna have that winning smile. Blake right now is in her prime, no doubt, but it would be unfair to project her attractiveness career going forward and put her ahead of Ryan, while Ryan has the complete resume right in front of us.
Advantage: Ryan
Prior Career Success
Ryan and Blake meeting on the Green Lantern set is a bittersweet fact. It’s sweet because they met, but bitter because Green Lantern sucks. You wish they had a more prestigious introduction, because they seem like prestigious people, but an examination of their pre-marriage careers kind of betrays that. Neither actor really delved in the world of prestige at all.
Ryan’s career before he met Blake is pretty unsurprising. Sabrina the Teenage Witch and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder gave him two memorable-but-trashy roles, then he had a cameo in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (sigh) before messing around a bit with movies like Blade: Trinity, Smokin’ Aces, and Definitely, Maybe. It’s a pretty poor lineup.
But then, somewhere close to 2009, Ryan decides he’s going to start giving a couple craps about his career. He lines up Adventureland (great role for him—he’s super scummy and cocky), then Buried (with apologies to Deadpool, the best turn of his career), with some X-Men Origins thrown in on top (almost made that movie worth seeing by himself). Pair that with the weird groundswell that surrounded his turn opposite Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, and people were super hot for Ryan by the time Green Lantern rolled around. Girls liked him for his rom-com chops and guys liked him for his championing of Wade Wilson and the then-precarious Deadpool movie. Ryan wasn’t a prestigious actor, but he was a popular one, and high school told us that’s all that matters.
Blake only has five years under her belt by the time she meets Ryan. She was in both Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies (more well-received than you think, by the way), a couple tiny movies, and then The Town. It’s hard to evaluate Blake in The Town—well, it’s not, really. She’s bad in it. But she’s bad in an endearing I-really-want-to-be-good-in-this-movie way. It was a bad role for her and she was definitely miscast, but you still have to knock it a little bit even if it’s not totally her fault.
Of course, the real credit to Blake is Gossip Girl, which she’d been starring in for three seasons by the time she met Ryan. The show made Blake somewhat of an icon in the teenage demographic, and her character was central to a show that many consider to have one of the quintessential breakout casts of the new millennium. Blake wasn’t just popular, she was important, and while her future husband had a few well-received roles by this point, no one was seeing things like Adventureland and Buried, so his critical success had almost zero impact. On the strength of her TV career alone, Blake takes this one.
Advantage: Blake
Future Ambition
Retrospection matters a little bit in relationships. Say you’re a gold digger and you marry a rich guy with a solid-gold yacht, but then after you marry it’s found that the solid-gold yacht is actually made of pyrite. First off, what a dum-dum move by you—back in Arizona we learned how to identify fool’s gold on Day One—and second off, this is going to affect the perception of your marriage to outsiders. Are people still going to say you married up if you’re married to a disgraced, penniless former millionaire? No way. That marriage was a terrible decision. The point here is: If either Blake or Ryan elevated their status (or lowered it) after their marriage, it will matter when answering Who married up.
Blake and Ryan were married in 2012. By this point, Gossip Girl was wrapping up its final season, and Blake wouldn’t hold a regular role on TV again. When it came to movies, Blake’s only significant turn comes in 2016’s The Shallows, where she fights a giant shark for 90 minutes. The Shallows is a blast and Blake is a warrior in it, but if that’s your best movie since you began to see Ryan Reynolds, you’re in for an uphill battle. (Worth mentioning also that Blake tried to start a Paltrow-esque ecommerce site called Preserve in 2014, but she shut it down in 2015 with the statement that it wasn’t ready yet. Rats.)
Ryan, meanwhile, has only cemented his cult-hero status. Has he been in some stinkbombs? Yes—Turbo and R.I.P.D. belong in their own special graveyard—but he’s also appeared alongside some real heavyweights since he met Blake. He’s opposite Denzel in 2012’s Safe House, he’s opposite Ben Mendehlson in 2015’s Mississippi Grind, and he was opposite nobody in Deadpool last year. Now, you can argue Deadpool is overrated, but what’s hard to deny is the way Ryan forced that character into the public consciousness and kept him there. It is impossible to think of Deadpool without thinking of Ryan, or vice versa. He made that figure an icon all by himself, fighting for the movie’s existence from Day One. Blake’s still finding her way, and that’s okay, but even if Ryan’s purpose is to champion a superhero that drops as many penis jokes as bad guys, it’s fun to have him fighting for a cause in the midst of his marriage.
Advantage: Ryan
Prior Relationships
Now remember, we’re framing this from a competition aspect. If you want to date some guy but you see that all these other girls are going after him too, it’s more to your credit if you take the bold steps to pursue him and ultimately win his heart over the other girls (this sounds like The Bachelor in real life, now that I think about it). We’re going to see who stood out more in a crowd, Blake or Ryan.
According to some real iffy things I found online, Blake’s been rumored to have had relationships with: Kelly Blatz (Simons Says co-star; your guess is as good as mine), Penn Badgley (Gossip Girl co-star who looks like an American Henry Cavill), Leonardo DiCaprio (!), then Ryan. In fact, it seems Ryan was the direct follow-up to Leo. Fascinating. Should earn him major points in the tally.
Ryan is an older man, you’ll recall, which means his history is a bit more storied. Ryan’s had two engagements before Blake, one with Alanis Morissette (she sings “You Oughta Know”) and one with Scarlett Johansson, who Ryan was married to from 2008-2010. Now, we know that one of Morissette’s albums, 2008’s Flavors of Entanglement, is a result of her breakup with Ryan, which is a hardcore thing about both of them, and we know that after Ryan and ScarJo divorced in late 2010, he began his relationship with Blake not long afterward. So Blake was Ryan’s “I’m ready for love again” following his divorce, which is astonishing. Given that said divorce was with Scarlett “My voice alone was enough to make Joaquin Phoenix want sex with a computer” Johansson only makes it more impressive. Leo can take a hike. This is true power. Blake definitely overcame more competition to win Ryan’s heart. That puts her in a higher league.
Advantage: Blake
So who married up? Well, Blake comes from a more prestigious background and was amid her semi-iconic Gossip Girl role when she met Ryan, who at that point was pure rom-com charm and dramatic potential. Ryan’s renewed sense of purpose and focus with Deadpool makes him a bigger deal now, and his 40-year-old brand of attractiveness still makes the ladies holler wherever he goes. Don’t forget, though, that Blake was Ryan’s answer after a tough ScarJo divorce. It’s a tight race to see who’s in a higher league.
Now, there’s one thing we’ve yet to consider, and it’s that oftentimes, someone’s league is a matter of perception. Even if reality begs to differ, perception still factors if one half of the couple thinks they were marrying up. Check out this quote from Ryan, from a speech he gave after receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame:
“I want to thank my wife, Blake, who is everything to me. You are the best thing that ever happened to me—second only to this star. You make absolutely everything in my life better. You’ve made me the father of my dreams when I thought I only had fun-uncle potential.”
It’s the perfect Ryan quote: Funny, charming, from the heart. You hear him say that and there’s no doubt that, even though Blake Lively technically married up, Ryan Reynolds still feels like he married up. Happy marriages are so awesome.
That’s my expert analysis.