Inside Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Private Marriage

Why Hilarie Burton Morgan Practices MAGIC Around Her Kids

Celebrity couples tend to fall into one of two camps. 

There are the public and very online pairs that roast each other on social media, work through marriage problems on their shared podcasts and take to YouTube to divulge their origin stories.

They talk about mandatory date nights and their partner's penchant for buying flowers just because or leaving love notes in the medicine cabinet. It's all very sweet and gives us a reason to comment #goalssssss and instruct our significant others to step up their game. 

And then there are those who feel they've turned over a certain portion of their private lives to fans and that their relationship is the one thing that they can keep to themselves. 

Though they've slowly ramped up their public displays of Instagram-ing along with the occasional joint step-and-repeat and their pandemic-era AMC series Friday Night in With the Morgans, Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan once fit squarely into category number two.

At some point in 2014, a rumor began that the duo, who'd taken to using "husband" and "wife" as pet names, had gotten secretly hitched.

And the premise seemed reasonable enough that everyone just ran with it, including Morgan—marking his 60th birthday April 22—and his future bride, who has gotten a bit more comfortable sharing the magic behind their romance.

"For years, publications have reported that we got married in 2014 or 2015 and that I've been married and divorced before," Burton, 43, wrote in her Instagram wedding reveal. "All untrue. But WE knew our truth. So it felt silly to try and correct anything."

Basically, it's hard to be 100 percent certain just what is going on in their lives at any given moment. And that's just the way Mr. and Mrs. Morgan like it. 

Perhaps it was liquid courage, or lowered inhibitions, but either way Morgan got Burton to cancel a planned trip to France so that she could join him on the set of his 2011 horror The Resident. "I talked her into, instead of going to Paris, to come and see me in New Mexico, he recalled. "And I ruined her life and now she's stuck with me."

Well, not stuck, per se, but certainly committed. Because by the time they let fans in on the fact that they were a duo, they had already become a trio. True to form, initial details on their son were scarce, with Burton electing not to share his name or his March 2010 birth date because as she told the Associated Press "I want to protect them like a mama wolf should." 

But slowly the pair began opening up about the somewhat Rockwellian life they share on a working farm in Rhinebeck, N.Y., some two hours outside the city where they tend to cows and alpaca and deal with the daily happenings at the nearby candy store they share with Paul Rudd. 

So pretty much everything was perfect, with one notable exception. 

For five excruciating years, the couple struggled to expand their family. It was a deeply personal confession from a generally private pair, but Burton felt compelled to present the February 2018 arrival of daughter George with a message to "all the women out there who are trying" not to give up hope. She likely wouldn't even have posted about the new bundle, except that Morgan was back on the convention circuit and he knew himself well enough to know that he wouldn't be able to hide his elation.

"So before he starts tripping up in an attempt to maintain our privacy," she wrote on Instagram, "he asked that I go ahead and post something about our little girl's birth." 

Family finally complete (with Dad delivering both kids with an assist from the midwife), the two couldn't stop gushing about how darn happy they were. 

There were the requisite birthday shout outs, of course, with Burton posting a video in which she and the kids playfully argue over who loves Morgan the most and the actor, in turn, marking the anniversary of her July birth by calling her "the hottest chick on the planet" along with the "greatest mom, partner, and best friend a fella could ask for."

But there were also the for-no-good-reason tributes, Morgan telling the world how much he loved Burton in April 2019, because he "figured a public declaration may put a smile on her face." 

The twosome were just so loved up, so firmly cemented that they soon realized their protestations about marriage really didn't make any sense. They had, as Burton noted in her Instagram reveal, lived their vows to each other for the past 10 years, but now it was time to actually say them aloud.

"You just hit a point one day when you want it to be real and our lives are very, very busy," the A Christmas Wish actress told Us Weekly in October 2019. "It became really easy to just be like, 'We're close enough. We're close enough.' But you also want to set an example with your children and we didn't want to be liars anymore! We called each other husband and wife because we lived as husband and wife."

Plus, it saved her from having to dodge follow-up questions. "I've been calling him my husband for years because when you say that you're engaged, everybody's so nosy and they're just, 'When? Where?' You know?" she explained to E! News at the junket for her Lifetime holiday flick. "And so I wanted to do it on our time. And that's what we did. And thankfully we've got a really great core group of people around us that let it stay private and intimate."

So she schlepped into the city for a visit with Carol Hannah to create the perfect buttons-down-the-back strapless white wedding gown she never thought she wanted, booked a weekend at NYC's Bowery Hotel, tapped The Band Method to play, Poppies and Posies to provide the flora and Jensen to officiate alongside Morgan's TWD costar Norman Reedus.