Ellen Pompeo and Chris Ivery’s Marriage Is the Stuff of Hollywood Dreams

Pompeo and Ivery may be Hollywood royalty now, but their courtship was the stuff of low-budget, indie-movie, meet-cute dreams: after a chance encounter in a grocery store, they squabbled over the phone when Pompeo finally returned one of Ivery’s many calls. “We had a fight first, and then, you know, that’s kind of always the way to my heart,” Pompeo told Drew Barrymore in 2022. “Piss me off and I’m all yours.” Same, girl! (Also, am I the only one who desperately wants to know which grocery store it was? The Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake has some down-to-earth romantic appeal, but I feel like Pompeo and Ivery are more the Gelson’s-hot-bar type.)

Pompeo and Ivery are now parents to three children—Stella Luna, Sienna May, and Eli Christopher—and the way Pompeo talked about motherhood during her recent appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy only made me admire her family unit even more. When host Alex Cooper mentioned that she’d been advised against having kids while maintaining a career, Pompeo told her: “People who judge that and make those very ignorant comments, they lack wisdom and they lack intuition and they lack magic… You cannot be a mother and have children and give a hundred percent to your job. You can’t because…you’re no longer just you. You split into different pieces. And you know what that does? It makes you more soulful. It makes you richer. It makes you funnier. It makes you feel more. It makes you more empathetic. It makes you angrier…. You will be yourself times a thousand.”

Obviously, Pompeo isn’t the first to chafe against the regressive notion that you can’t have a family and work at the same time, but I am so entirely charmed by her promise that working while mothering makes you “yourself times a thousand.” At the risk of chalking a woman’s success and stability up to her relationship, I do feel like this is the kind of confidence that can bloom from a truly connected and equal partnership—one in which your spouse provides genuine support for you and your family. (I mean, what do I know—maybe Pompeo has to nag Ivery to pick up the dry-cleaning all the time—but I can just tell there’s good couple energy here.)