I Want What They Have: Olivia Colman and Ed Sinclair

Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.

Isn’t it a relief to meditate on the relationship between an Oscar-winning actress and her partner, and realize that you know absolutely nothing about them? Hear me out: In this age of 24-hour entertainment news and constant scandals du jour, sometimes less information is more—and that’s exactly the case when it comes to The Lost Daughter star Olivia Colman and her husband of over 20 years, the actor and writer Ed Sinclair.

Colman isn’t one to talk much about her family life, but in September, she opened up about falling for Sinclair in the 1990s, telling The Telegraph, “It sounds really odd, but I did fall in love with him at first sight. When he walked into the room, I just went, ‘That’s him!’ Mind you, I suppose if he hadn’t wanted me, then I might have gone, ‘That’s him!’ at someone else a week later.” (I love her. She should divorce Sinclair and marry me.)

Like so many all-time great Hollywood couples before them, Colman and Sinclair are fairly tight-lipped about their relationship, but when Sinclair’s series Landscapers—in which Colman has a starring role—premiered last year, Colman explained how her marriage operates vis-à-vis work. “We worked out very early on that it’s much better if he’s a writer, I’m an actor and we don’t talk about it,” Colman said, and frankly, even as a constitutional over-sharer, I can see the beauty of simply dividing up tasks and not having too much of a dialogue about it. She went on to describe the process of getting feedback from her husband in her inimitable style: “He tried to give me a note once which went down like a cup of cold sick!” A vivid image, to be sure, but once again, all I can do is marvel at the pair’s total commitment to characterization and resolve, for the umpteenth time, to stop dating people in the same industry as me.

Not only do Colman and Sinclair enjoy an incredibly boundaried love story (and mind you, as a queer person, talking about a straight couple’s appreciation of boundaries is literally the highest compliment I can give), their union has also brought forth three children: two sons and a daughter. In what seems like a direct contrast to many celebrities’ approaches to childrearing, Colman and Sinclair keep their kids as hidden from the limelight as they do the details of their relationship, and they’re to be commended for it. After all, does the world really need another celebrity kid’s bespoke sock line?

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