Strange Things About Troian Bellisario And Patrick J. Adams' Relationship

It will apparently never cease to blow minds that Troian Bellisario and Patrick J. Adams are a couple. In 2025, netizens were still expressing surprise upon discovering that the "Pretty Little Liars" alum and the "Suits" star are married, even though the actors' unique love story, which has taken some fairly strange twists and turns, began back in 2009. Along the way, they've guest-starred on each other's shows, but for one of their shared television credits, they didn't cross paths.

Bellisario appeared in two episodes of "NCIS" in 2005 and 2006, a gig that probably wasn't too difficult for her to get; her dad is the series' creator, after all. As for Adams, he played a serial killer in a 2008 episode. He would begin dating Bellisario a year later when they appeared in a play together. Now, the married couple seems to believe their romance was written in the cosmos. "Somehow in the grand chaos of the infinite unfolding my collection of atoms met yours," read a segment of Adams' 2018 birthday message for his wife. Not to be outdone, Bellisario marked another trip around the sun for Adams by gushing in a 2022 Instagram post, "The miracle of this universe (for me and my little corner of it) is that you were born and I was born within the same epoch."

But the fated pair aren't immune to celebrity crushes, with Adams admitting to having a thing for Charlize Theron in a Buzzfeed video. And when Bellisario told him that "Barbie" star Ryan Gosling is who leaves her all starry-eyed, her husband responded, "I'm Canadian, that hurts." Openly discussing their attraction to others who work in their industry might seem a bit bizarre. However, it's not nearly as gnarly as some of the weirder details about their relationship.

Patrick J. Adams and Troian Bellisario both attended the University of Southern California, but the first time Bellisario recalls meeting her future husband is when she attended a play he directed in 2006, "Marat/Sade."On the "Work in Progress" podcast, Bellisario recounted being introduced to him by some classmates. "I was like a nerdy freshman ... and he, in my memory, was standing underneath the streetlight with a cigarette," she said. The pair's paths crossed again when they worked together on the 2009 play "Equivocation," and they started dating. Although Bellisario's first encounter with Adams left her admiring him as a visionary artist, the romance didn't last — and it was Bellisario who ended things.

But then Adams cooked up a screenplay-worthy scheme to get Bellisario back. An opportunity to audition for a tiny role on "Pretty Little Liars" fell in his lap and he seized it, seeing it as the perfect excuse to start talking to his ex again. "I prepared for this 'Pretty Little Liars' audition more than I've prepared for anything in my life," he recalled to PopSugar (via E! News). On "Work in Progress," Bellisario said Adams called to give her a heads-up when he got the part, and they rekindled their romance before he filmed his scenes — none of which she was even in.

While "Pretty Little Liars" helped bring him and Bellisario back together, Adams didn't always have the highest opinion of the teen soap. When it ended in 2016, he addressed the show in a lengthy (and slightly odd) farewell post. He concluded it by writing, "I'm sorry for any disagreements — we both meant well. But now I'm gonna take Troian's hand back and follow wherever it leads."

Patrick J. Adams and Troian Bellisario's careers exploded soon after they first met; "Pretty Little Liars" premiered in 2010, and the first episode of "Suits" aired the following year. Because the former was filmed in Los Angeles and the latter in Toronto, they found themselves spending a lot of time apart — and it turned into a long-distance situation that they had to navigate for years. "We both spend so much time on airplanes," Bellisario revealed in a 2014 "Larry King Now" interview. "But it's worth it."

The weekends were the only time they usually could carve out in their schedules to be together, creating an unusual relationship dynamic. When Bellisario appeared on the "Dinner's on Me" podcast in 2025, she jokingly told host Jesse Tyler Ferguson that the amount of time she'd spent with Adams in person was "three [years] tops" after 15 years together. "We always used to joke that the number of in-room hours is real low," she said. "Like, we're basically just dating."

During his separate "Dinner's on Me" appearance, Adams revealed that the distance is one of the reasons why he decided to leave "Suits" in 2018. "We had been away from each other for seven years. ... It was time for us to start our lives," he said, adding, "It felt like a prison sentence." However, after relishing some time with a better-balanced schedule, the pair apparently discovered that a little distance can be a good thing. In a 2025 New Beauty interview, Troian revealed that she was ready for her husband to hit the road again when she had a break from filming "On Call," saying, "I was like, 'OK, your turn. Get out of here.'"

After Troian Bellisario and Patrick J. Adams got married in 2016, fans learned how their love story began: with a special date night orchestrated by Adams. "We were tired and overworked and just wanted to have some peace and quiet. So he invited me over to his apartment where he had built us a pillow fort," Bellisario recalled on Instagram. "He stapled sheets and Christmas lights to the ceiling. ... That was the first 'Fort Day.'" Those hours they spent bonding in their little sanctuary became a tradition, and it was during another Fort Day that Adams proposed.

The couple used their pillow forts for inspiration when planning their wedding, but they traded bedding for rows of tents and Adams' apartment for a Cali beach. Ahead of the event, Bellisario told People her fiancé was doing most of the prep work for their big day. "I am terrible at planning things," she admitted. "He is a total visionary, so I really trust him on a lot of the aesthetic things." However, she did tell Hello! that she picked out her dress, revealing that she fell in love with a two-piece Cortana set because she could re-wear her top. She also wore her skirt (pictured above) to the Golden Globes.

Bellisario also wore a long veil that picked up some extra embellishments as she walked: bits of leaves and twigs. "If [the] ceremonial cleaning of the veil isn't a thing it should be," Adams captioned a video of wedding guests meticulously removing the debris. In lieu of limos, attendees piled into an old school bus, and the wedding entertainment included archery. "The couple that shoots arrows together, stays together," Adams wrote beneath a photo of him and his bride getting their Cupid on.

In 2023, Patrick J. Adams and Troian Bellisario invited Architectural Digest inside their Los Angeles home for a video tour. One stop was the bottom of a staircase, where the wall was lined with photos and an unusual art piece: a series of framed notes. Adams revealed that they were mementos from a trip to Paris, recalling, "We had gotten into a horrible fight, and we didn't want to talk to one another." But instead of completely shutting down communications, they started scribbling notes on hotel stationery and passing them back and forth across a table. One note read, "I love you even when you make up the rules ... especially when you make up the rules."

This wasn't their only quirky décor decision. They explained that a super-sized portrait of their second child, Elliot, loomed over their other smaller family photos because they realized they hadn't taken many pictures of her. Bellisario confessed that they weren't so neglectful with the camera when they first became parents, as evidenced by the frequency of appearances by their other daughter, Aurora, on the wall.

When the couple showed off their kitchen, Bellisario complained about having to replace her favorite blue bowls with white ones because Adams didn't like the way they looked on the shelf they were displayed on. "He told me that they were offensive to his eyes," she pouted. At least the couple didn't have an even more offensive photo hanging up in their home: the picture of Adams dressed up like a gun-toting cowboy that he posted on Instagram in 2011. In it, Bellisario is wearing Native American garb — and Adams' cowboy has tied her up. "Have a culturally inappropriate Christmas," Adams captioned it. Yikes.

Troian Bellisario doesn't eat meat. While Patrick J. Adams doesn't share this dietary restriction, his wife also doesn't expect him to deprive himself of the protein. However, their different culinary preferences caused a slightly awkward exchange when Bellisario called her husband to ask him what steak he wanted from the grocery store — forgetting that he was in the middle of a podcast interview. Proving that he's a wife guy all the way, Adams took her call. He also put her on speakerphone so she could explain to "About Last Night" listeners why she had inadvertently interrupted the interview. Of her lack of knowledge about New York strips, ribeyes, and all the rest, Bellisario said, "I constantly am like, 'What kind of steak and how much do you want me to buy for you, can you please describe it to me in detail?'"

Adams didn't share his steak preferences on-air, but when Condé Nast Traveler interviewed Bellisario in 2023, she revealed another beefy treat her husband is fond of: a burger from Yuca's Tacos. "I always know when he's a little bit late picking up our daughter because he stopped at Yuca's," Bellisario said.

Of course, sneaking a little meat during his solo school run doesn't fully satisfy Adams' carnivorous cravings. When Buzzfeed tested the couple's knowledge of each other, it took Bellisario two guesses to correctly identify pepperoni as her hubby's favorite pizza topping (her first guess was nduja). Adams was also wrong when he confidently said that pumpkin is his wife's top pie topping — it's actually burrata.

Patrick J. Adams and Troian Bellisario welcomed their first daughter in 2018, and the couple managed to keep her name a secret for an entire year. Bellisario finally spilled the beans by casually dropping the moniker in a post on her Instagram Story. "Trying to figure out which of these I'm gonna give to Aurora for dinner," she wrote (via E! News).

While some outlets noted that Aurora is the name of the princess in Disney's "Sleeping Beauty," Bellisario told Teen Vogue that she and Adams were scouring Greek mythology for monikers they liked when they decided to switch ancient civilizations. "We learned in Roman mythology that Eos was Aurora, which is the goddess of the dawn," she said. "And we thought it would be nice that she would be our dawning of a new day in our life."

Unfortunately, the name's deeper meaning goes unnoticed by most, as it immediately evokes images of spinning wheels and evil fairies. "So many people now are like, 'Oh, like a Disney princess?' And I feel like Patrick's like, 'Ugh.'" Bellisario said. While Adams might not be a fan of the association, the name arguably works on this level as well because it seems that he met his daughter once upon a dream. "Before I knew I was pregnant, you dreamed of her," Bellisario wrote in an Instagram post addressed to her husband. "Before we knew she would be born female, you asked for a daughter."

When Troian Bellisario gave birth to her and Patrick J. Adams' second child in 2021, she teased that their daughter's arrival was quite the tale. "Ms Elliot Rowena Adams joined us on May 15th under the wildest of circumstances," she wrote on Instagram. Fans got all the gruesome details from the couple on the "Katie's Crib" podcast. While they managed to make it to the hospital when Bellisario went into labor, they couldn't leave the parking lot.

Adams asked a security guard for assistance and opened the door of the couple's car as Bellisario pushed. But by that point, she was way too far along to be moved. "She is still on all fours, butt facing the windshield," Adams recalled. "Her butt's at my head level, so I just go and pull down her pants, and the head is right there." He delivered the baby himself and was given hospital scrubs after his wife's afterbirth ruined his outfit. 

"We still have pictures. It looks like a full crime scene," Bellisario revealed on "Dinner's On Me." She and Adams later returned to the scene of the crime to snap the photo above with baby Elliot. According to Bellisario, the hospital gave her and Adams security footage of the birth. "It's just a wonderful shot of our car, [and] Patrick diving into the car ... Then he turns around and then he reappears with a baby, and he was just covered in afterbirth," she said. Elliot won't just have a unique birth video to commemorate her arrival to the world. In an interview with Extra, Bellisario said that she and Adams were considering keeping the vehicle Elliot was born in to give to her when she turns 16.

Patrick J. Adams and Meghan Markle played love interests on "Suits," and no one will let the former forget it. Even after their working relationship ended, Adams had to field questions about whether he would work with Meghan again, and some of the Duchess of Sussex's most hardcore haters went back and dissected old footage of the actors in hopes of finding evidence that they might have been more than co-stars. "These guys 100% had some sort of secret off-screen relationship," read one Redditor's reaction to their 2013 "Larry King Now" interview. It doesn't help matters that Adams has been a vocal Meghan defender and once deleted a throwback photo of Meghan kissing him on the cheek. He was married to Bellisario at the time and Markle was dating Prince Harry. "It was such an innocent moment of sentimentality that was twisted into something totally different," he later told Esquire.

In the Larry King interview, Adams said his favorite scene with Markle was when their characters, Mike Ross and Rachel Zane, had sex in a file room, and Bellisario confessed to PEP.ph in 2013, "It's definitely not the most pleasurable thing that I get to do when I watch [Adams'] romantic scenes." However, she also described Markle as a "sweetheart" and told Grazia that she used to help Adams prepare for his scenes with Markle by reading the royal's lines. "I was Rachel all the time," she said.

Bellisario even appeared on "Suits" and shot scenes with Markle. However, some skeptics remain convinced that there's bad blood between the two women. In response to a 2024 clip of Adams commenting on Meghan's popularity, one Redditor predicted, "Patrick's going to end up divorced over his obsession with Harry's wife."

Months before Meghan Markle tied the knot with her first husband, Trevor Engelson, Patrick J. Adams was busy indulging his armature photography hobby by posting photos of Troian Bellisario on his nascent Instagram account. The couple seemed content, but it's unclear if Bellisario was Adams' plus one when he attended Meghan and Engelson's September 2011 wedding. However, in his book "Meghan: and the Unmasking of the Monarchy," author Andrew Morton writes that guests at the event observed that Meghan and Adams were "uncomfortably" close.

While whatever supposed "off-screen chemistry" Adams and Meghan had remains up for debate, Meghan did not snub Bellisario when she married Prince Harry in 2018. Adams was among the "Suits" stars who attended the royal wedding, which meant that Bellisario also got a ticket to the hottest event of the year. However, it sounds like she didn't exactly view the invitation as a cause for elation. She later explained to The Daily Telegraph that learning her outfit had to include a specific form of headwear caused her a headache. "I also had extreme anxiety about... what are they called? Those hat things? That's it, fascinators," she said.

While some royal wedding attendees love wearing over-the-top headpieces, Bellisario said she was worried she'd be accused of trying to hog the spotlight if she chose a fascinator that was too flashy. "It was a nightmare," she recalled. She also felt that they were a dated accessory, saying, "They look ridiculous unless you're in the 1930s." With Meghan and Adams losing touch with each other and the Duchess of Sussex being on Buckingham Palace's bad side, at least Bellisario can take comfort in knowing that she probably won't be getting any more invites to royal events.