Blake Lively Shares the ‘Rules’ She and Ryan Reynolds Laid Down at the Start of Their Relationship

In a new interview with her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants co-star Amber Tamblyn, Blake Lively revealed how she and Ryan Reynolds began their relationship with some ground rules when they started dating in 2011. She shared her story on Tamblyn’s Substack show, Further Ado, released on February 22.

“When Ryan and I got together, we made a rule not to work at the same time,” Lively explained. “So that we could always prioritize our personal life.”

She continued, “That takes working really hard when we’re not. Just like financial planning and sustaining that; it takes balance.”

At the time they got together, Lively was still working on Gossip Girl, a show with a pretty demanding schedule.

“I’m used to working hard and going and going and going and going and not stopping,” Lively reflected. “Especially, Gossip Girl was six years of my life, and we were sometimes shooting three episodes at once.”

The couple married in 2012, and the show came to an end in December of that year. A few years later, Reynolds and Lively had their first child, a daughter named James. They’ve since welcomed three more children, seven-year-old Inez, four-year-old Betty, and a baby born in February of 2023, whose name has not yet been revealed. Though they don’t hide their kids, they also have some rules about how to manage a family while being in the spotlight.

“Ryan had a nice, normal upbringing, and we want our kids to have the same normal life that we had,” Lively told Marie Claire in 2016. “We don’t ever want to rob them of what we had because then we’d feel really selfish.”

Lively also shared how much of a priority family is to her in general.

“My parents, my siblings, my daughter, my husband, my nieces and nephews—that’s where I get very mama bear,” she explained. “There are two ways to look at it. You could look at it as, ‘That’s what I’m vulnerable about.’ But also, ‘That’s the thing that excites me in the world.’ So I don’t really think about them as my vulnerability as much as I think about them as my reason for everything.”