This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
Justin and Emily Baldoni marked 13 years of marriage on July 27 the way plenty of couples do, with a pair of sentimental Instagram posts celebrating each other.
What made this particular anniversary sound different was that fans immediately dug for hidden meaning in Emily’s caption, and once they found what they thought they were looking for, the internet had itself a new theory to run with.
Nobody involved has confirmed that theory, but that has not stopped it from spreading across social media in the hours since.
Justin kicked things off with a lighthearted tribute of his own, sharing a wedding photo from their 2013 ceremony and joking about a small mishap from that day.
According to People, in a picture that captured their wedding festivities, Justin, 42, wrote, “13 years later… we’re still dancing. ❤️ Happy anniversary, my love. I’m pretty sure this was the exact moment my pants ripped open. 😂 #FinallyTeenagers.”
It was the kind of caption fans have come to expect from Justin, warm, a little goofy, and clearly affectionate toward his wife of over a decade.
The Anniversary Posts, Side by Side
Emily’s contribution to the anniversary celebration told its own story visually, built around a black-and-white photograph of Justin lifting her off the ground.
The image itself reads as a classic, almost old-fashioned wedding style shot, the kind of pose couples strike for a photographer somewhere between the ceremony and the reception. It is the caption underneath that photo, however, that has generated the bulk of the conversation online.
“Marriage: still my favorite lift,” Emily wrote, pairing the wistful black and white image with a line that, on its face, reads like a simple play on words.
Lifted off the ground by her husband, still lifted by their marriage more than a decade later. Taken entirely on its own, without any surrounding context, it is a sweet and fairly straightforward sentiment for a 13th anniversary post.
Except plenty of people online did not take it entirely on its own. Given everything that has played out publicly between Justin and his “It Ends With Us” costar Blake Lively over the past two years, the word “lift” landed differently for a chunk of the audience reading Emily’s caption.
Social media users quickly connected it to one of the more widely discussed details from Lively’s legal battle with Justin, and the theory that Emily’s anniversary post doubled as a quiet jab took off from there.
Why Fans Zeroed In on “Favorite Lift”
To understand why one word in an anniversary caption set off this much speculation, it helps to revisit what actually happened during the “It Ends With Us” production.
Lively alleged in her lawsuit that ahead of filming a scene requiring Justin to physically lift her, he contacted her personal trainer to ask about her weight.
According to court documents, Lively said she found out about the call and felt blindsided and uncomfortable that the conversation had happened without her knowledge, especially given that she had given birth to her fourth child only months earlier.
Justin’s side of the story, laid out in his own court filings, offered a different explanation entirely. His legal team said the inquiry stemmed from chronic back problems and a genuine concern about performing the lift safely, describing the conversation as a private, one-time question asked discreetly and outside Lively’s presence.
Both accounts of that single phone call became a well-known flashpoint in a legal dispute that stretched across nearly two years and touched on allegations of sexual harassment, retaliation, and a contentious public relations battle that played out through numerous court filings and media reports.
Given how much attention that specific detail received throughout the case, it is not hard to see why the word “lift” jumped out at fans reading Emily’s caption.
The interpretation being floated online connects Emily’s phrase directly to that piece of the Lively dispute, framing “favorite lift” as a subtle way of reclaiming the word on her own terms.
It is a reading that requires the audience to already know the backstory, but for anyone who followed the case closely, the association was apparently impossible to unsee.
Here is the important caveat, though. Emily never mentioned Blake Lively by name in her post, and she has not issued any statement confirming that the caption was meant as commentary on the lawsuit at all.
The entire theory rests on the wording of one caption and its resemblance to a detail from a legal dispute that has technically already been resolved. Until Emily or Justin says otherwise, this remains fan interpretation rather than a confirmed message from the couple themselves.
This Wasn’t the Couple’s First Public Word Since the Case Wrapped
The timing of the anniversary post is part of what fueled the speculation in the first place, since it landed only a few weeks after Justin and Emily addressed their ordeal directly for the first time in nearly two years.
On July 8, the couple posted a joint video to Instagram following the May settlement of Justin’s legal battle with Lively, using the moment to speak publicly about how the previous two years had affected their family without naming Lively or the film outright.
“We are healing,” Justin said in that video. “And if you’ve ever been through something traumatic, you know that healing isn’t linear. It looks different every day.”
He went on to describe how the experience reshaped what he and Emily considered most important, pointing to their kids, their extended family, their community, and their shared faith as the things that carried them through the ordeal.
“I think we’re closer and more devoted and steadfast in our faith than we’ve ever been,” he added.
Emily spoke in that same video as well, though more briefly, backing up Justin’s reflections and noting that the timing finally felt right to speak after staying quiet for so long.
“And this feels like the moment,” she said, echoing Justin’s explanation that the couple had held off on commenting publicly for the better part of two years despite having plenty they could have said.
That July 8 video marked their first joint public remarks since Lively’s lawsuit was filed in December 2024, and it set a noticeably reflective, faith-centered tone heading into the couple’s anniversary just weeks later.
Seen against that backdrop, it makes sense that fans were primed to read extra meaning into whatever the couple posted next, even something as ordinary as an anniversary tribute.
Whether “still my favorite lift” was meant as a knowing wink at the Lively case or simply a sentimental caption about a sentimental photo, only Emily knows for certain, and she has not said which it is.
For now, the internet has its theory, the Baldonis have their anniversary post, and the gap between those two things remains exactly that, a gap that has not been officially closed by either Justin or Emily.
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