If you’re seeking poignant examples of the human condition, you can’t do better than Humans of New York. Photographer Brandon Stanton’s confessional portraits have been extracted everywhere from the Oval Office to the Middle East. Most recently, they've hailed from South America, but typically they just come from the streets of New York City, the city that inspired it all. And once in a blue moon, they feature one of the world’s most beloved couples.
That would be Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who surfaced in the HONY feed late last night after Stanton snapped them at the Met Gala. The photo itself is staggering — the tux-clad actor has one hand firmly pressed against Lively's gold tasseled gown; she leans into the crook of his shoulder and places one bejeweled hand against his chest — but it's Reynolds' words that really demand one's attention. Not even Deadpool, you see, can get out of baring his soul.
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The Canadian star has done plenty of gushing about his wife of four years on talk shows and in magazine profiles, but there's something especially raw and intimate in this quote.
“She always responds with empathy," he said of Lively, with whom he has two young daughters. "She meets anger with empathy. She meets hate with empathy. She’ll take the time to imagine what happened to a person when they were 5 or 6 years old. And she’s made me a more empathetic person. I had a very fractured relationship with my father. Before he died, she made me remember things I didn’t want to remember. She made me remember the good times.”
Oof. The feelings. Not surprisingly, Lively herself "liked" the post when it popped up on Instagram.
Reynolds' father died in 2015. He shares a name with the couple's oldest daughter, James, and one can't help but wonder if that was Lively's attempt to patch things up between father and son.
One thing we know for sure: We totally heart these two.
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