Matthew Morrison may be more well-known than his wife Renee Puente, but the Hawaii native has gushed over the actor every chance she gets.
“When he came up to me, I had no idea who he was,” she told Martha Stewart.com about meeting the Glee star for the first time at a Grammys afterparty in 2011. “I just started laughing because it was so adorable to see this cute white boy talking pidgin [Hawaiian slang].” As Morrison said, “The rest was history!”
The Music and Lyrics actor popped the question two years later, during a romantic horseback ride in her home state. “I didn’t realize what was happening until I saw the tears in his eyes — and Matthew’s not a crier,” Puente told the outlet in April 2015 of the proposal. “The whole world just stopped. And so I hadn’t answered him yet, and he asked, ‘So will you marry me?’ Then I finally said, ‘Oh, yes!’”
The actress and model also confessed that she wasn’t particularly interested in marriage until she fell in love with her now-husband. “I was always that girl who dreamt of her wedding until I got older, and then I didn’t want to get married anymore. But Matthew changed my world,” she noted. The twosome went on to welcome son Revel in October 2017 and daughter Phoenix in June 2021.
In February 2021, 10 years after their first meeting, Puente once again opened up about the ways her life had changed as the result of their romance. “The tapestry we have created together is so complex, so colorful, wild & free. I couldn’t have imagined a life like the one we’ve manifested for ourselves,” she wrote via Instagram at the time. “Full of wonder, imagination, play… Thank you for helping me become the expression of the woman I AM today.”
Puente continued: “Thank you for the purest, most precious love. Thank you for holding me, physically, emotionally, spiritually. It sounds so simple as we do not have the language that represents what you are to me.. but thank you.”
However, the duo’s romance was hit with controversy when Us Weekly broke the news that Morrison was leaving So You Think You Can Dance in the midst of filming season 17. “Having the opportunity to be a judge on So You Think You Can Dance was an incredible honor for me,” he said in a statement in May 2022. “Therefore, it is my deepest regret to inform you that I will be leaving the show. After filming the audition rounds for the show and completing the selection of the 12 finalists, I did not follow competition production protocols, preventing me from being able to judge the competition fairly.”
A source subsequently told Us that the musician had sent text messages to a female contestant that “were deemed inappropriate and broke protocol” by Fox and he was fired as a result.
“The messages contained sexual innuendos and were flirty to the extent he was overstepping boundaries,” the insider said. “He didn’t have sex with the contestant, but she complained to producers about him because the messages made her feel uncomfortable and awkward and then they took it to HR.” Puente has not yet publicly commented on her husband’s firing.
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