Michelle Williams is reportedly engaged: A look back at her romances
Is she or isn’t she? Weeks after Michelle Williams brushed off her heart-shaped diamond ring simply as “beautiful jewelry,” Us Weekly claims the actress is engaged to Andrew Youmans.
“She wants a good guy and a stable family life,” an insider alleges.
A rep for Williams would not comment to confirm or deny the report when contacted by Yahoo Lifestyle.
Williams, 37, and the 50-year-old New York financial consultant were first photographed showing PDA on the streets of Rome in July 2017. They have yet to make an official public appearance together, but they were recently spotted vacationing in the Bahamas over New Year’s Eve. The actress was wearing the same diamond ring. Williams’s 12-year-old daughter with the late Heath Ledger, Matilda, was also on the trip.
The four-time Oscar nominee is notoriously private about her personal life, so it’s unsurprising that there is no official word on whether she and Youmans plan to walk down the aisle. Before dating the Harvard Business School grad, the actress was linked to novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. They were said to be seeing each other in 2015 but never publicly commented on a supposed romance.
Prior to Williams’s recent low-key relationships, she was in more high-profile romances with Jason Segel, Spike Jonze, and most notably, Ledger.
Ledger died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2008, less than a year after splitting with Williams. The couple — who began dating in 2004 after meeting on the set of Brokeback Mountain — never wed. They welcomed Matilda Rose in November 2005.
“In all honesty, for pretty much everything else, I feel like I’m a believer in not fighting circumstances, accepting where you are and where you’ve been,” Williams told Porter magazine in 2016. “In pretty much all senses but one. I would be able to go totally down that line of thinking were it not for Matilda not having her dad. You know that’s just something that doesn’t … I mean, it just won’t ever be right.”
Seven months after Ledger’s shocking death, Williams attempted to find love again. The actress began dating Spike Jonze, with whom she worked on the indie film Synecdoche, New York. They were in a relationship for about a year before breaking up.
“The timing was impossible,” she admitted to Vogue in September 2009. “I thought falling in love again was the only thing that was going to save me from the pain. This erroneous idea: It just makes things more complicated.”
Being a single mother didn’t make dating again easier, as the actress told the magazine, “I obviously don’t know how to do it.”
Williams didn’t have a public romance again until 2012 when she got together with Segel. The Forgetting Sarah Marshall star was often photographed hanging out with both Williams and Matilda, and the public seemed to adore the Hollywood couple. “If people are happy about it, that makes me feel good. … Any kind sentiment that the world can feed back, well, I won’t turn it down,” Williams told InStyle in February 2013.
After a year together, Segel and Williams split with distance being to blame. “She cares a great deal for Jason but is not ready to make a commitment,” a source told People at the time. “Maybe if they were together day-to-day, she would have more confidence in a future. But not at this time.”
Despite not finding “the one,” Williams was never discouraged. In January 2017, the actress told WSJ Magazine that while being a single parent had its challenges, she didn’t feel pressured to get married just to do it.
“It’s a little bit difficult to contend with a feeling of failure for not living up to a standard of normal,” she shared. “Sometimes it can feel alienating; at school functions, there’s only two of us single mothers. Everyone else has a partner, so we buddy up. … When you’ve been a parent for 11 years and you’ve done it alone, you don’t have romantic ideals, because you have a practical understanding that you can do it by yourself. The romantic idea of meeting your person and having a storybook family life that looks like the model you grew up with — that doesn’t really exist for me.”
Williams added, “I’ve not gotten married because I have not had a person to whom I would — so I have not let my sense of conformity or duty override my instincts.”
This will be Williams’s first marriage, if the engagement report is true. While we don’t know if Williams and Youmans plan to tie the knot, there is one thing we do know: The All the Money in the World actress deserves all the love in the world.
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Smooch! Diane Kruger and Norman Reedus finally make it official at 2018 Golden Globes
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