“No one should get married before they’re 30,” advised a straight-faced Tom Hanks.
“I wish there was a secret, you know,” Hanks continued, speaking candidly outside the Outfest Legacy Awards in Los Angeles in 2015, as reported by People. To date, Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, have been married for 30 years and counting. “We just like each other,” he said, simply. “You start there.”
It can’t hurt that the modest veteran actor and movie director felt he was batting way out of his league when he first met Rita, and the feeling hasn’t diminished over time. “I still can’t believe my wife goes out with me,” Hanks joked. “If we were in high school and I was just funny, I’d never have the courage to talk to her.”
Wilson first caught Hanks’s attention in 1981 as a guest star on the young actor’s sitcom Bosom Buddies, but the pair wouldn’t meet again until four years later. In 1986, the stars aligned, and the loved-up couple eventually married on April 30, 1988.
Sensibly, they’re not joined at the hip. Hanks attended the premiere of Clint Eastwood’s 2016 movie Sully on his own, and was accosted by curious reporters on the red carpet. “Where our house is, [Rita] would’ve had to leave last Thursday in order to get here on time,” Hanks laughed. “She stayed home and is recovering from her busy schedule.”
The actor has long been vocal about the fact that conflict rarely raises its ugly head in the Hanks-Wilson household.
“They say it must be hard work. No, it’s not,” he shared with The Mirror. “We give each other a natural sense of support for whatever the other wants to pursue. Our marriage doesn’t require vast work.”
“We … dig each other a lot.”
Their strength and commitment has certainly been tested over the years. The couple’s initially comparable careers splintered somewhat as Wilson stepped into producing and touring with her band, and Hanks went on to achieve critical acclaim as an actor, winning two industry-coveted Oscars.
But far from fracturing the couple’s bond, they have remained mutually supportive since the very beginning. “I could not be standing here without that undying love,” Hanks said in his first moving, Oscar-winning speech for Best Actor in 1993’s Philadelphia.
However, the couple were truly tested when Wilson underwent surgery to treat breast cancer in 2015. “I was so amazed, so blown away by the care my husband gave me,” Wilson told People during her recovery. Her husband had few, but poignant, words to say about Wilson: “All I can do is bow down before the courage of my wife,” he shared.
Today, the couple are consciously grateful. “We’ve gone all over the world,” Wilson said in interview with E! News. “We’ve taken our family. We have so much fun.”
Thirty years of marriage and mutual support through thick and thin has formed an unbreakable partnership, one that can endure anything that life has to throw at them. “We laugh just as much now at two in the morning as we always have,” Hanks shared, fondly.
“And we fight less and less.”
Louise Chambers
Author
Louise Chambers is a writer, born and raised in London, England. She covers inspiring news and human interest stories.
