Kristen Bell Is Refreshingly Honest About Why She And Dax Shepard Need Couples Therapy

While marriage is often romanticized, the fact of the matter is that it takes hard work to keep such a relationship healthy. Looking at the entertainment industry, there are countless examples of couples who eventually divorce, whether it’s after just a few months or many years after they first tied the knot. Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, however, are still matrimonially tied together, although Bell recently acknowledged that she and Shepard have had to go through couples therapy.

Why is this? Well, apparently the pandemic that’s affected all our lives for more than a year now put a strain on Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard’s marriage. As Bell told Chelsea Handler, who was guest hosting Ellen:

At the beginning of the pandemic, we were at each other’s throats. And then all the doors locked in our house, like, we had to stay inside, and we were like, ‘Woof. We need to get a handle on the annoyances.’

With Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard both being well-known actors, it was to be expected that their busy schedules would factor into their romantic relationship. However, as it did with so many people, the pandemic provided unexpected challenges in their lives, and it reached a point where Bell and Shepard decided to seek outside help. Fortunately, Bell loves their therapist Harry “so much,” and among the pieces of advice she’s gotten from him is to “do something nice today and don’t get caught.” Bell also noted that she learned that when you’re living with another human being, the reality is that eventually you’ll find that person annoying, so you need to “brush up on your toolbox” since relationships take work.

As for how the couples counseling process between Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard has been going, Bell said they’ve been meeting with Harry separately rather than shared sessions. The actress continued:

Currently, right now, what we’ve been doing the last couple of months is every two weeks or so, I’ll see Harry via Zoom and complain about Dax, and then he’ll give me all the reasons why I’m wrong and then Dax will do the same. And then, by the time we meet up in the evening, we love each other again.

Kristen Bell then said that when you have a “third party moderating any disagreement,” it’s “always a safer place,” as two people arguing among themselves just “messes up the solution.” Clearly couples therapy has been working out wonderfully for Bell and Dax Shepard, so fingers crossed it continues to help with their marriage.

As for Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard’s respective professional endeavors, Bell has the movie Queenpins coming out on September 10, and will also reprise her Gossip Girl narrating duties for HBO Max’s upcoming reboot, which premieres on July 8. Shepard can next be heard voicing Ruben in PAW Patrol: The Movie, which arrives on August 20.

Adam Holmes
Senior Content Producer

Connoisseur of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, John Wick, MonsterVerse and Doctor Who lore, Adam is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend. He started working for the site back in late 2014 writing exclusively comic book movie and TV-related articles, and along with branching out into other genres, he also made the jump to editing. Along with his writing and editing duties, as well as interviewing creative talent from time to time, he also oversees the assignment of movie-related features. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism, and he’s been sourced numerous times on Wikipedia. He's aware he looks like Harry Potter and Clark Kent.