Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard's Most Honest Quotes About Their Marriage

Just because Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard are two of the funniest people in Hollywood doesn’t mean they don’t endure the same relationship struggles as any other couple. The Veronica Mars alum and Parenthood actor — who tied the knot in October 2013 and share two daughters, Delta and Lincoln — have been open and honest about their fight to work at their relationship and remain a unit. Scroll down to look back on their most candid quotes about marriage.

“We make an effort to cuddle and remain physical with each other,” Bell told Us in January 2018 of keeping the spark alive. “You find you’re often cuddling with your girls, but then you realize you haven’t touched your partner on the back of the neck or put your arm around him in a week. It’s just paying attention to things like that that I think will keep you connected.”

“We don’t believe in The One. We don’t believe in the fairytale. We don’t believe that you can meet someone and you have a perfectly matching personalities,” Shepard explained to Us in December 2017. “We are opposites and it has taken a tremendous amount of work and therapy for us to coexist.” He added: “[Relationships] are labor intensive. If you want them to last, they are labor intensive.”

“Our marriage took a lot of work, takes a lot of work. I don’t think people realize,” the Frozen star told Us in August 2017. “It is not easy to work around another human being, but if you commit to it, you can pretty much permanently respect that person, but then it doesn’t really matter if you disagree because you still respect that person. But on a daily basis, he just makes me laugh all the time. He’s obsessed with attention, so he’s constantly making jokes to try to get me to give him more attention or to get me to giggle. And you know, he was a stand-up comedian, so I’m living with a comedian.”

“I do disagree with him on 90 percent of the issues on the planet,” Bell explained to Us in August 2017. “But we have really wonderful, intense valued conversations about things, and I always see his point, even if I disagree. It’s hard to do.” As for how — and why — she makes sure to understand him, she added, “It’s all about contempt. Never roll your eyes at someone. You might as well break up right then because it's contempt. I’m telling you — I disagree with him on almost everything, but I have intense respect for his critical thinking skills and the fact that we were raised differently. I always see his point. I do not and will not ever have contempt for him.”

“But the family rule is no more than two weeks apart no matter what,” the CHIPs actor told Us in December 2017 of making sure their busy schedules don’t keep them distant. “There isn’t an excuse.”

Bell opened up in a July 2017 interview with Redbook and revealed she and her husband schedule time for sex. “We’re pretty decent about staying on top of it,” she said. “We’ll be like, ‘OK, it’s been how many days?’ We find a night when nobody is coming over and we don’t have to work super early in the morning, and then we slot it in.”

“We went to therapy early on to learn what our pattern of arguing was and where we needed to stop that,” Shepard explained during a Good Morning America interview in March 2017. “It’s great too, because you go to the therapist and he listens to you talk for about 30 seconds and then he’s like, ‘I got it.’”

"Slowly I began to see her positive way of looking at the world," Shepard told Good Housekeeping in April 2015. "She gives people the benefit of the doubt. There were hurdles, things she didn’t trust about me, things I didn’t trust about her. I just kept going back to 'This person has the thing I want, and I have to figure out how we can exist peacefully.' So we started [seeing a therapist together] right away."

Shepard told People in 2019 that he and Bell “had to work really hard at being a couple” because they’re both “incredibly, painfully stubborn, and we’re pretty much opposites.”

“I was like, ‘That’s the best personality I’ve ever seen on a woman. I need to be around it. I want to be around it when I’m 80, but how?’” he added. 

Bell also spoke about their differing personalities and how they make it work in a 2024 interview with E!. 

“I married my polar opposite,” she said. “We are the antithesis of each other. We argue about absolutely everything, but there is a foundational trust that we’ve built that keeps us together and is quite stimulated by one another’s opinions.”

The Frozen actress added that “being with someone who you are unlike or you don’t have a ton of similarities with, it forces you to grow.”

During a September 2025 conversation with Alicia Silverstone about her 20-year relationship with her ex-husband, Chris Jalecki, on Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, the Zathura star said he would never look at his marriage to Bell in a negative light, even if they were to separate in the future. 

“I say this all the time, like, if Kristen and I ever split up, I would only describe this as still an enormously successful relationship,” Shepard said. “Like, we loved each other to death. We had these two beautiful children. We had this great time together.”

Shepard added that he felt like he would be “dishonoring” his marriage by not thinking of all his wonderful times with Bell.