There are celebrity couples who say they love each other, and then there is Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who say it with paparazzi walks, piggyback rides down Manhattan sidewalks, and captions that somehow manage to be romantic and completely unhinged at the same time.
Their latest round of Father’s Day content is exactly what you’d expect from a couple whose primary love language is making the rest of us feel single, and it did not disappoint.
The It Ends With Us actress, 38, kept the Father’s Day energy going well past the actual holiday, sharing photos of the two of them walking together in New York City alongside a caption that read, “father of all my favorite children.” Not the father. Not just my husband. The father of her favorite children.
Breezy, warm, a little possessive, and technically leaving the door open for unfavorite children somewhere. It’s a sentence only someone deeply, comfortably, thirteen years in love could write, and it lands exactly the way she intended it to.
Lively and Reynolds have been married since 2012, and the couple shares four children: daughters James, Inez, and Betty, and son Olin.
They are, by most accounts, one of the more functional and genuinely affectionate families in Hollywood, even as they navigate the kind of public scrutiny that would send most couples into crisis mode. If anything, they seem to lean into it.
The Father’s Day Tribute That Started It All
On Father’s Day, June 21, Blake Lively took to her Instagram Stories with a sweet tribute to Ryan Reynolds. In the first post, she shared a rare photo of him carrying and kissing one of their four children, writing alongside it, “No one I’ve ever known is greater than this man.”
That alone would have been enough. Most people would have stopped there. Blake Lively is not most people.
She followed that up with a throwback video clip from the 36th American Cinematheque Awards in November 2022, during which she had taken the stage to honor Reynolds as he received the award, all while visibly pregnant with their fourth child, Olin.
Below the clip, she added a quip that somehow made the whole thing both more sentimental and funnier: “This pregnant lady with laryngitis seems to be a big fan.”
The 2022 speech itself is worth revisiting because it captures exactly why this couple continues to capture public imagination in a way that most celebrity duos simply don’t.
Standing before the crowd, Lively said of Reynolds: “Now I am his home, our girls are his home, and just like that 19-year-old boy, he races home whether it’s from across the globe or immediately across the street, he is hardwired to get home.” She didn’t stop there.
“If he came home from set not in his wardrobe, we would be very concerned, soaked in mud, fake blood, real blood, prosthetic scars, superhero suits, tap shoes, or clown makeup, Daddy always comes home,” she continued, threading comedy and tenderness together so seamlessly that half the audience was apparently in tears and the other half was laughing.
She went on: “And that man races back to his real life like nothing I have ever seen, especially not by someone who’s able to be so all-in in his work life. He’s able to somehow be everything to everyone all at once.”
For a woman known equally for her sharp wit and her ability to mean exactly what she says, that’s as close to a love letter as it gets, and she chose to resurface it for Father’s Day, which means she still stands by every word.
The speech ended with Lively wrapping up in her signature style, telling the crowd: “That’s really all I want to leave you with tonight, not with the specifics of his actions, but instead with the DNA of who he is.” The room, by all accounts, was completely won over. Reynolds included.
A Quiet Grief Tucked Into a Joyful Day
What made the Father’s Day tribute particularly layered, however, was the moment Lively used to honor someone who is no longer here. Alongside her tributes to Reynolds, she also took time to remember her late father, Ernie Lively, who passed away in 2021 from cardiac complications.
She shared a photo on her Stories of Ernie smiling down at one of her children as she held them, and wrote simply: “Love to everyone today who doesn’t have their dad.”
It’s a small caption, but it carries enormous weight. Father’s Day is, for millions of people, a complicated holiday, one that carries grief alongside celebration, absence alongside gratitude.
The fact that Lively acknowledged that reality in the middle of what could have been an entirely light-hearted social media moment says something about her.
It was a brief pause in the warmth, a reminder that she holds both things at once. The joy of watching Reynolds carry their kids through golden-hour light, and the ache of a father who will never get to do the same again.
Ernie Lively, a film and television actor himself, was 74 at the time of his death. He died from cardiac complications in Los Angeles.
Blake had always been open about the close bond they shared, and his presence looms quietly over many of her public moments, even or especially, the happy ones.
The NYC Outing, the Reynolds Appreciation Era, and What It All Adds Up To
The Father’s Day posts didn’t appear in a vacuum. They came at the tail end of what has been, by anyone’s measure, an extended and very deliberate Ryan Reynolds appreciation era on Blake Lively’s Instagram.
Earlier this month, she posted a photo of Reynolds leaning against a counter while carrying a tiny Hermès Kelly bag over his shoulder, captioning it: “My account has officially turned into an OnlyFans.” Before that came a cookie-date selfie, and a close-up of his biceps set to a Justin Bieber track.
The couple was also spotted walking around New York City together on a heavily photographed romantic outing, with Lively playfully patting Reynolds on the back as he glanced at the camera.
Reynolds even gave her a piggyback ride down the sidewalk at one point, while she was wearing open-toed Louis Vuitton heels.
It was the kind of couple content that looks effortless, even if everything about it was deeply, specifically curated, and the internet had opinions about exactly that.
Across social media platforms, users suggested the outing may have been staged as a form of image management following Lively’s high-profile legal dispute with director Justin Baldoni. “This pap walk was written and directed by Blake, right?” one commenter wrote.
Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton joined in, joking: “How kind of their bodyguard to stay out of frame so the paparazzi could get those clean shots.”
Others pointed to the timing; the couple was back in court just days after the NYC photos surfaced, with a judge ordering both sides to address attorneys’ fees, litigation costs, and potential damages stemming from the now-settled lawsuit. Reports suggest both parties spent a combined $60 million on the legal battle.
That context is worth noting, even as it exists separately from the emotional reality of what Lively actually posted for Father’s Day.
Whether or not the NYC walk was a calculated media moment, a woman resharing a speech she gave while pregnant about the man she loves, one that she wrote herself, in her own words, standing in front of a room full of people, is harder to dismiss as performance.
That speech existed long before any lawsuit, any settlement, any comment section drama. She chose to bring it back for this holiday, and that choice tells its own story.
Reynolds hasn’t been quiet on his end either. On Mother’s Day last month, he posted an Instagram tribute to Lively, writing: “I appreciate this mother beyond measure.
She is kind. She is fearless. She’s the absolute love of my life, and to our four little kids, she’s the love of their love.” These two have been in what amounts to a year-long mutual appreciation loop, taking turns posting something embarrassingly sincere about the other, then letting humor soften the landing.
It’s a pattern that has held for over a decade, which is remarkable in an industry where public declarations of love often curdle fast.
The couple first met on the set of Green Lantern in 2011, a film neither of them tends to bring up with much enthusiasm, and married on September 9, 2012.
What followed was a partnership that felt both very public and genuinely private, four children whose faces are rarely shown, a family home largely kept off-camera, and two people who seem to understand that the trick to surviving Hollywood as a couple is never letting the audience fully in.
The “father of all my favorite children” post is, in the end, a perfect encapsulation of where they are after thirteen years together.
It’s funny enough to feel casual, specific enough to feel intimate, and just slightly absurd enough to make you smile and keep scrolling. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and Blake Lively knows that. She always does.
