How Did Jimmy Kimmel & Molly McNearney Meet?

It’s been a long and winding road for Jimmy Kimmel and his wife of three years Molly McNearney. Mainly because these two funny people knew each other for a long time before things turned serious in their relationship. Long before these two became romantic, they were actually co-workers, working on the same end goal: Writing funny jokes for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Except Kimmel was technically her boss, and McNearney was technically his employee. So how did Jimmy Kimmel and Molly McNearney meet? It’s actually a pretty funny story from the way she tells it.

Not that it’s any big surprise that a story Molly McNearney tells is funny. As the former co-head writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, McNearney knows how to spin a funny yarn or two. The two met in a professional capacity, when McNearney started on the show as a writer’s assistant. Slowly she moved up through the ranks until she and Kimmel were working together more regularly. But, from the way she tells it, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight.

When McNearney was first introduced to Kimmel he reportedly insulted her. When one of the writers brought her in to meet Kimmel and mentioned to him that she competed in triathalons, she told Glamour exclusively, Kimmel said, “That is really stupid! What a waste of time.” That, she went on to say, was the only thing Kimmel said to her for the first year that she was working on the show.

It wasn’t until many years later, McNearney said in the same interview, that things turned romantic. “All the writers would socialize after the show, and we would just hang out more and more. We really liked each other as friends, and then it just kind of turned. He cooked for me, and that was it. It sealed the deal.”

And seal the deal it definitely did. The two would go on to marry in 2013 and have a child together — their daughter Jane was born in 2014. It’s certainly been a long road to romance for these two, but it sounds like letting it develop over time was the best way to build their amazing love.