Rashida Jones is explaining why she and boyfriend Ezra Koenig consider themselves husband and wife despite not being legally wed.
“We’re not married,” Jones, 48, told The New Yorker in an interview published Sunday, July 7. “We just kind of call each other that. But we are what we are, in the eyes of God!”
She continued, “My parents only got married when my dad had his first brain aneurysm and my sister was six months old, because of rights stuff. I’m sure we’ll get married at some point, but we basically are.” (The Parks and Recreation alum is the daughter of producer Quincy Jones and late model Peggy Lipton.)
In 2011 – years before Rashida and Koenig, 40, began dating – the I Love You, Man star touched on the subject of marriage, explaining why she may never walk down the aisle.
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“Marriage doesn’t really buy you anything. I mean, Chris Messina, who is my costar in [Monogamy] is with my very close friend [producer Jennifer Todd],” she told E! News at the time. “They’re not married, but they have two kids and they’re wildly happy. It doesn’t buy you anything. It just buys you a really big s—tty pageant of a wedding to make other people happy.”
Rashida and Koenig have been together since 2016. The actress and the Vampire Weekend frontman welcomed their first baby, son Isiah, in 2018, Us Weekly exclusively confirmed at the time.
While speaking with NPR in 2021, Rashida opened up about the “emotionally intense couple years that followed” the birth of their child, as her mom died from cancer in May 2019 eight months after they became parents. She was 72.
“It was sort of like back-to-back-to-back-to-back, just wrenching, pulling my heart in all different directions. … I was in grief-shock,” she explained. “I don’t even know if that’s a word, but I was just not in my body at all and just had a baby. I was doubly not in my body.”
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She continued, “The thing that’s the craziest about birth and death is just the utter rawness of feeling. I still feel this way, I think. It’s like something cracks in you. It’s very binary, both things — becoming a mother and losing my mother — like, there’s my life before and there’s my life after. And strangely, there’s something that’s not recognizable before those two things happened.”
