Sometimes, it’s the kids that know best. David Harbour and Lily Allen decided to get married in Las Vegas after a particularly pointed comment from her kids.
“We were riding around at the beginning of the [coronavirus] pandemic — she has two kids, these beautiful daughters, 8 and 9 — and we were riding bikes out in the country trying to figure out what we were gonna do for the next year or however long it was going to take,” the Stranger Things star recalled during a June 2021 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “And the little one was riding along and she was going like, ‘David, Dad, David, Dad.’ Because the ‘d’ got her confused. And the older one got very upset with that, which I understand, and she was like, ‘He’s not our dad! He’s not our dad!‘”
He continued: “And the younger one was like, ‘Well, what is he? He’s kind of our dad.’ She’s like, ‘No, he’s not.’ ‘He’s kind of our stepdad.’ ‘No, he’s not.’ And she goes, ‘What is he?’ And she goes, ‘He’s just some guy in our lives!’ … I was like, ‘I need to marry this woman.’”
Allen shares her two daughters, Ethel and Marnie, with ex-husband Sam Cooper, who she married in 2011. The couple separated in 2016, and she was first linked to Harbour in August 2019. The Black Widow actor popped the question one year later before he and Allen tied the knot in an Elvis-officiated ceremony in Las Vegas in September 2020.
“In a wedding officiated by the king himself, the people’s princess wed her devoted, low born, but kind credit card holder in a beautiful ceremony lit by the ashen skies courtesy of a burning state miles away in the midst of a global pandemic,” Harbour wrote via Instagram at the time, sharing photos from the ceremony and the subsequent celebration at In-N-Out with Allen’s daughters. “Refreshments were served at a small reception following.”
The “Fear” singer, who was unflinchingly honest about her marriage to Cooper in the wake of their split, credited the success of her relationship with Harbour to their communication and her sexual awakening. “A lot of this journey was not unrelated to the deterioration of my last marriage,” she told Womanizer in October 2020. “I definitely had a sort of sexual awakening in my late 20s. And by the way, I’m not blaming this on my ex-husband; it absolutely wasn’t his fault.”
She continued: “It was my fault because I wasn’t feeling empowered and I wasn’t able at that point to communicate my wants and needs, and so things broke down. I definitely don’t want that to happen again. I’m very much in love and happy in this relationship [with David], and communication in all areas is important.”
Keep scrolling to see Harbour and Allen’s complete relationship timeline:
